Chapter XI: Under the Blazing Sun
It was the jolting that brought him back to reality. It was slowing, becoming more regular. The bumps were further and further away in time between each other. Why is she…? Stupid animal, Azrael thought, shaking his head strongly and baring his teeth. The sharp ends of the long canine fangs scraped the edges of the bloodless lips, leaving short slashes on the lower lip. He smacked his own tongue, to try and get rid of the dry feeling that permeated his mouth, and unthinkingly licked the two cuts. No blood whatsoever had flowed from it. The thin skin of the lower lip was withered and dry, scarred by long signs of dehydration.
Without premonition and with no chance for him to control it, an image shimmered in front of his eyes. An image dating to some time back, although he wouldn't have been able to tell how long. He felt no beard covering his chin and cheeks and a hot breeze hitting him on the lower neck. He didn't have hair as long as he did now. This is so vivid. A fleeting thought, timeless and confused, said as it disappeared into the chaos. It was a corpse, charred. The sternum was incinerated, signs of burns were visible on the entire body and there was a shallow, burnt area that was slightly more dipped than the rest of the body's surface. The poor Elf had been killed by a wizard, with a stream of fire that had carved out a hollow in the skin, burning it away. The cinders lying on the ground were probably what remained of that dip without flesh. His face was the very image of pain, with dilated pupils and the tongue bit clean off. Apart from the blood, his lips were dry, scarred by long signs of dehydration.
Again, it was the jolting that brought him back to reality. The sounds of Shadowmere's hooves sticking in the snow were muffled. There was no wind, no other noise whatsoever to interrupt that calm or to disrupt that soft, continuous series of thuds. Now, as the image faded into the piercing light of the day, Azrael noticed that the mare wasn't having problems advancing. If fact, her head was bent towards him, the muzzle trying to touch his leg. She couldn't reach it, but the Dragonborn could feel her slow, cold breathing barely penetrating the joints of the armor. He was just now starting to piece the image together coherently, using all of his senses to make some sense of it.
His eyes wandered on the mare's black hair, following the line of her neck before reaching and noticing her big, round crimson eyes looking at him. Smart beast, he thought, with conflicting feelings. On the one hand he felt a strange lightness, the same he usually associated with something deeply ironic, but on the other there was a stronger and more violent grasp, a kind of disdain that arose from somewhere he didn't know. There was an awful confusion in his head, but one thing was certain. However he felt, whatever he felt, he couldn't change the stronger, underlying sensation on that last hour. Smart beast indeed, he said to himself, she can clearly see I'm dying. And she also knows that my mind has been somewhere else for the majority of this time.
And as he said it, he sensed it drifting off again, into the chaos.
Strength. The unholy, surprising strength of something that is so beyond human that has lost everything that related it to the concept. An individual is his weaknesses, there is no arguing. The protruding hand, one moment resting on the surface and the next pushing it hard against the wall. The strength gathers, condenses, it squeezes together into something that is the parody of might. It is its excessive paroxysm. Who would think that too much of something can transform that very something into its equal and opposite? The force that had surged through his arm when he pushed had nothing even remotely resembling control. It was completely out of control, the very essence of madness. It was without a balance of its own, a pointless excess that threatened to overwhelm the very person who was calling forth for its aid. That's not strength. It's a weakness. A soft spot. A power that needs to be harnessed before being used. Every fiber of his arm had been imbued and had acted with more strength than necessary. He had been the one to control the blow. He hadn't killed her. He thought he did not have the heart to. Even when she had jumped on him and bitten him, he hadn't thought of killing her. He had his dagger in the belt, it would have been so easy. It was a matter of grabbing it, stabilizing and stabbing upward. He could feel the soft tissue giving way to the metal.
He had decided against it, and now he was somewhere he didn't know. With his head, at least, he knew where he was with his body remarkably well. As soon as he had awakened, he had felt a powerful shift. He had never considered his own attitude towards his body before, but now he realized that he had always considered it as a mere tool, much like a weapon, which needed care and maintenance. He ate the necessary, drank the necessary, slept less than advisable and kept exercising it. He listened to it, fully aware of how powerful and insightful the messages coming from it were. Even when everything lined up rationally, sometimes the body would sent him messages in the form of discomfort, tension, sadness. He had never even dreamed of discarding those; most of the times, they were clues of the biggest pitfalls in his reasoning he could remember.
One thing had been invariable though: his body was a tool. It was a passive conduit through which information flowed and through which he made his ideas and plans reality. He had never thought of it as something active, an idea he was now forced to reconsider. It was as if his own flesh, dead flesh at that point, was trying to rebel against him. It had, in some ways, acquired a will of its own. It had its needs, wants, desires and the entire spectrum of weaknesses and vices that he associated primarily with his mental life. Sometimes, it refused categorically to give him even those basic information, fighting and resisting his will with every bit of energy it had, which was a lot. A systematic analysis of the amount of energy present in his body had suggested him that, even without the unnatural strength given him by his vampiric nature, his body held an amount of vigor he had not even dreamed of. Why did I have to wait now to realize? Now, when that very energy is defying me? The frustration mixed with his other raging sensation, adding even more mental clutter to the utter chaos. There were few others way to put it, and there were probably a number of solutions, but it was as if he had lost every ability to prioritize.
If at any point, he had realized, I had naturally learned about how strong the flesh I have on me was, it would have been strange nonetheless. But now, that I find this out when that same flesh is lifeless, it's even more eerie. He had known about how a vampire's body functions for quite some time now, but he had never asked himself what it felt like to live in one. The question was so far off from what he considered useful that it had not even gone by his mind. I have come close, at times. He had created a mental map of sorts, where he could understand what different reactions a vampire might have compared to a normal mortal. He had used that scrutiny to great effect when fighting the fiends in Dimhollow. He could generally predict their behavior better, but he had never used that knowledge to think how it would feel to live as an undead.
He knew now that it felt strange. With the life functions on halt, there was a constant tension flooding the entirety of the body. It turns out, we need to move to stay calm. Some people might need less movement than others, he was an example, but he constantly found himself breathing when there was no need to, or sometimes he would focus on the heartbeat, only to be reminded that there was no such thing as a heartbeat as an undead. The heart became a useless lump of flesh, activated briefly and thus useful only when imbibing blood. The breath and the heartbeat were the most noticeable, but after a while the complete halt of every known life function became harrowing. No hunger, no noticeable need to sleep, no need to urinate whatsoever and the list went on and on. I know that one can get used to everything, but how many realize how much we are used to being alive? Now that he was somewhat dead, he thought that very little people probably did.
And it didn't stop at the body, because the Dragonborn's mind too felt disrupted. Or rather, destroyed. His lifelong ability and ally, his capacity to concentrate for a nearly unlimited amount of time on a single object, had abandoned him. In its absence, the mind had become restless and agitated. Thoughts stormed through his head instead of swiftly and cleanly flowing through it. While his body rebelled, his mind had seemingly given up and collapsed on him with all its weight. He found it difficult to focus on his surroundings, even. His attention was swept away in such a short time that he couldn't notice much at all. By the time it came back, he had almost forgotten what he was trying to analyze in the first place.
The white color that prevailed on any other tint in the landscape he was traversing had reminded him numerous times of how very tranquil and cool his mind felt until a few days ago. There was always a sense of calm and clarity, the serene awareness that he could have died in that very moment being satisfied with what he had done. Ever since he had killed Titus Mede, a sort of lucidity had started to accompany him. And ever since he had killed Alduin, that had transformed into that cool, tranquil sensation. Other issues had arisen, but they were beyond the point in that moment, because the impression of lacking meaning and purpose hadn't disappeared. On the contrary, it was stronger now more than ever.
In the tempest raging in his mind, where the most terrifying daemons his head had ever created were feasting on the very thing that had created them, his lack of purpose was among the strongest. Part of his sense of despair was exactly that. He was going forward, he sometimes remembered to notice the bumping underneath him, but he had no idea of why. Where was he going? He knew, somewhat, but it was as if only part of his mind knew. Moreover, the why was completely alien to him consciousness. In a way, there were many and there were none at the same time. There were many because every single one of his thoughts had invented from scratch a reason to go to that place, but they were fabricated reasons. Mere stories, delusions. In his few moments of clarity, he had tried to unravel that confusion and find his true motivation, and he had found many and none all the same. The ones he had found the most strange were two, almost opposite in nature, which came from what seemed to be polar opposites in his mind. One was centered around a strong feeling of emptiness, and motivated the journey by arguing that it was the only thing left to do. Azrael was unable to give himself instructions, so Lord Harkon's ones had taken their place. On the other hand, there was a part of his own mind that he had never really explored in his entire lifetime that suggested something different. He had never explored it because, while his every mental capacity was functioning, that would have been something to suppress, something too weak to be accepted. It was a softer, more sentimental side of him. Nameless, forlorn, spiteful, that had seen now its chance to rebel. That part actually wanted to get the Bloodstone Chalice, because in retrieving it he would gain Serana's appreciation.
Before he could throttle that irrational idea right in the back of his mind, the moment of lucidity had ended, and he had found himself once again imprisoned in aimless, confused thinking and pointless musing. It was like floating on the surface of a sea of delusions, hallucinations and mistakes. He felt his bond with reality growing weaker, becoming so thin that it could probably break at any moment. The feelings had grown in strength with the passing days, and he didn't know what waited him when it would finally rupture. Madness? Death? Nothingness? None could be discarded. It would seem logical to be worried of losing one's sanity, he had thought the one time he had clearly seen it arise. And yet, I feel completely apathetic about it. Do I really have so little to lose? Or is my fear submerged under this mire of senseless thoughts? The very concept of fear, of that kind of fear, of the fear that is real and motivated and that cannot be put down, was new. If he was afraid, then that fear would be something different, like panic, desperation. It was a terror that couldn't be fought, because its object was inevitable. There was nothing left to do, expect feeling fear. And even that was denied from him.
There was only confusion, chaos and the thirst. The cursed thirst.
Not unlike the other things that were dragging him deeper and deeper into the chaos, that had also started a few hours after leaving castle Volkihar. It was a minor thing at first, or it seemed like it. Just a feeling, that strange sensation one gets when he doesn't know if he's hungry or thirsty. A very slight dryness in the mouth mixed with a craving to feel something descend down the esophagus. When it happened, he usually drank. So, without thinking too much, he had reached for the flask and had drank a sip. The water would be needed until he reached the outskirts of Solitude, which would have taken a day. He had to measure how much water there was and keep it for later.
But to his own surprise, he had found the water horrible. Its taste was unbearable, so much so that he spit everything he had drank on the ground, causing the blanket of snow to melt and slightly collapse where the liquid had landed. It wasn't long before he reached the conclusion that, of course, he wasn't a living being anymore and didn't need any water. The speed at which his sense of taste had registered the water as bad was impressive, and he had managed to ponder that for a while thanks to his somewhat functioning mind. He even managed to be interested in it for a while.
That bad experience taught him something, something which managed to distract him from the feelings of thirst for a short while. The sensation grew very quickly, unexplainably, and without any reasons whatsoever. It was when passing Solitude by that he had understood what was happening, and he had rather it hadn't happened in that way. It could have been a lot worse in the end, but it had been still difficult. He could trace the greatest loss of his mental capabilities right in that moment. It was twilight and the Sun was setting; he was absentmindedly riding past the city and trying to find the way that lead far from the main road, through the swamps of Morthal. The only segment of the highway he was forced to follow was the one that led from the port to the main gate, but he usually managed to avoid any contact with the people going up and down that slope. He had managed that time as well, in fact he had found only one person walking towards the port, but that had been more than enough.
Suddenly, without any sort of wind that could carry the scent or any other explanation he could give on the spot, a maddening smell of blood reached him. Instinctively, he thought the odor was coming to him by the nostrils, as any other aroma, but closing them with his hand didn't help. As he rode past the man, the scent became stronger, overflowing in his nose, palate and whole head. There was no explanation for this, but he could also see and hear the scent. He saw the man and saw the blood flowing in him, he heard his heartbeat pumping the sweet substance through the whole body. The dryness in the throat became intolerable and all his resolve was simply going in forbearing from jumping at the man's throat, ripping it open and drinking his fill. Gruesome thoughts were racing through his mind.
His body had started rebelling to him before, but once the blood got to it there was seemingly no way of keeping it in check. It all revolted at once, drowning him in pain and suffering the likes of which he had felt extremely rarely. It spit against and laughed at his thick skin in matters of that kind. Azrael took pride in his self-control, but that was the ultimate test to it. He felt attacked from the inside, his resistance being torn apart and shrinking into nothingness, leaving him exposed to the cruel voices chanting for his doom. He had spent a lifetime shielding himself from the world around him, mainly by withdrawing from it. He had spent his relatively short lifespan in the effort to avoid being betrayed, only to be destroyed and put down by the only thing he had never thought could turn against him. Himself.
The folly had started then. The day after, in a moment free of the raging flow of suffering and confusion, he had thought about that accident once again and considered that the problem was a counter-intuitive one. He had managed to resist, not to jump at the man's throat and sucking him dry. He had won against his impulses, but that brief victory had depleted all his energy. By the time he had spurred Shadowmere and ridden far away for the scent to disappear, the icy veil which coated his mind had been melted away. Softened and liquefied, and then blown away. His clarity came seldom around, once every few minutes, as if to allow him to glimpse at his own descent into insanity.
He had started to feel his bond with reality getting weaker and his energies starting to dissipate. Once far from Solitude, alone and quaking from the fear that thirst had arose in him, he had realized how terribly weak he was. He was hungry and thirsty at the same time, his mouth tasted of blood without having ever savored it. He knew what he needed, but he refused to give in. He had still some food left in his bag, and tried to eat it. Of course, as he knew himself, he had spewed the chewed food shortly afterwards, undigested and untouched. He couldn't eat, couldn't drink and he was also losing the habit of breathing. His body, even while rebelling his will, was still as a stone. It didn't move, it didn't twitch, it didn't get tense. For three decades he had lived with his neck always tense, so much so that it ad to be cracked every once in a while. That was equally true of his hands and fingers. He cracked both of them still, but there was no stiffness in the bones or in the muscles. The body felt still, lifeless. Because it is lifeless. It had no way to dispel its terrific energy by moving, as the one of a mortal does, and that only intensified the strength with which it opposed his control.
The journey after the failed attempt at eating had only got more difficult. Defining it with anything, even by saying it was difficult, was hard for him. He had started to feel more and more pain as the day turned to night, but with the increasing suffering came also some relief in the form of forgetting. If anything, his perception was becoming more and more blurred. He lost himself and conserved little to no memory of certain things, at times entire periods of time. It was like fainting, but while remaining awake. He fell so deep down into the chasm of his mind that it was impossible to notice anything else. Once, in desperation, he had attempted to fall asleep. Even that had proved impossible. It's not vampirism, I've seen Serana sleep many times. It must be my normal wakefulness, brought to extremes. The insomnia had proved very powerful, enough to keep him awake for the four days and a half already. It seemed he was getting distracted from falling asleep, and his restless mind never stopped.
From what he could put together, the journey through the swamps hadn't posed many problems. He had made that journey five times during the cold season, and Shadowmere knew the way by that point. She had followed the riverside of the Karth Delta and had crossed Dragon Bridge by night, probably without anyone noticing. Azrael only remembered only a brief moment of travel along the riverside, when he had given her a pat on the neck for having continued on her own. The affection he had felt in that moment for the mare was strange, almost alien. Before drifting back into the lethargy, he had briefly considered it without reaching any satisfactory answer. He vividly remembered one moment, a minute at most, galloping in a place that looked like the road a few miles before Dragon Bridge. The third time had been shortly after having crossed the bridge itself.
After that, the mare had followed the road she knew. She followed the river upstream and kept going North until they reached the edge of the inner part of the swamps. She had carefully avoided Morthal and all roads that went through the area, both the main ones and the secondary ones. Of that, Azrael remembered their entrance in the swamp, the reek of cold and rot that floated in the still air of the bog reaching his nostrils attenuated. He knew then that, while he could sense blood from very far away, his sense of smell had deteriorated. The most surprising thing was that, without him telling her to stop, Shadowmere kept galloping. When he had some time to fully realize this, it had been three days of uninterrupted journey without her resting a moment.
There had only been one occasion when she stopped, and only because he ordered her to. In a moment of lucidity, he had commanded her to halt. He felt drained and restless, and wanted to sleep. One of the many times he tried. He had tried on the saddle, but nothing had come of it. He tried again on the ground, his back against a tree, but he only ended up staring into the distance for three hours, his attention lost and consumed by the things tormenting his mind. When he had come to, he had quickly mounted back on and wandered again into unconsciousness shortly afterwards. That stop had been for nothing, and the feeling of helplessness and rage had grow so prominent that it was starting to intertwine with the other parts of his stormy mind.
Shadowmere had quickly returned on the usual route, and the journey across the Pale had proven calm and utterly lacking in surprises. Azrael, in another moment of clarity, had realized with a certain degree of appreciation that the mare hadn't taken the way they had been forced to follow during the winter. Almost three weeks had passed since he had found the corpse on the road leading to Dawnstar, and back then the snow was already starting to melt. Now, it wasn't any higher than a couple of feet, even in those lands. Shadowmere had recognized this and had remained far from any roads, proceeding East with just a couple of miles separating them from the shoreline. The Sea of Ghosts was calm enough, no strong winds blew from its direction and the weather had been strangely good during the journey, thus far.
The moments of clarity in the almost two days that had passed had been few and scattered, and had brought Azrael to a couple of troubling conclusions. He was rather used to moments when the whole reality around seem seemed to shake so strongly that it seemed unreal. He had had his share of moments, minutes, hours or days when his mind had completely gone out of control, fleeing and chancing after itself endlessly in a perpetual cycle of questions and confusion, fears and apathy. His years as a youngster had been full of them, and there had been some in his more mature years. The last one had been after being cursed with the Blood of the Wolf by the Companions. He vividly remembered the pain, the anger and the mental anguish he had felt, and had kept it clear in his mind to prevent such a thing from happening ever again.
It hadn't happened again, in a way. That loss of control over the mind, that charging of energy and failed attempt at discharging it, had been only an extremely short phase of what he was going through. What was happening now was different. The initial chaos had been so overwhelming that his desire to split from his own mind had been granted, in a twisted way. Exception being for the few moments of clarity, he no longer felt anything, thought about anything or did anything. He had successfully separated himself from what was bringing him so much suffering, but at a cost he had never imagined he could pay. It's not as if I chose, he had thought, bitterly, on the very end of a few seconds of lucidity. Afterwards, he had drifted back into the hollowness he had created to escape. There were no more thoughts. No more pain. Not even the thirst. The cursed thirst.
When split from his awareness, he didn't feel the heat any longer. Of all things, that was the one he had been most eager to forget. The thirst had eaten away at his mind, but the heat was consuming his body. He felt it penetrating the armor, seeping underneath the metal plates and coating his skin, ripping shards of it away in blazing flashes of pain. After all, he was a young blood-starved vampire who was riding in a black armor under a blazing Sun.
Suddenly, without explanation, he reentered in the aware side of his mind. He clearly saw the shape of a tree, a pine-tree with its green needles and white snow covering its top. It was the only plant in a very long stretch of ground. On his right was a hill, coated with snow. One of its sides was a wall of black stone. On his left, the Sea of Ghosts expanded further than the eye could see. The light was piercing and excruciating, as if entering in the folds of the hood and burning his eyes. The thirst ravaged his body. The heat was burning him alive. There was a weakness, a spreading sense of feebleness in his body.
The world was becoming paler and paler with every moment. The pine-tree lost its outline, the other things were soon forgotten. He was feelings a strange sense of imbalance, as if having lost every kind of equilibrium. The cold air came through the junctions of the armor on his back and he didn't feel the saddle anymore. I'm falling, he realized. The impact with the ground was almost unfelt. The head smashed down second, immediately after the left shoulder. A surge of energy filled his limbs for a moment, but it was far too weak to achieve anything. His body contracted one last time before being emptied of all its energy.
I'm dying.
A/N: Ever since I created a outline of Day Keeper, Night Reaper I was curious about how this chapter would turn out. Slower, shorter, very deep, very brainy, approaching an emotional and personal topic with Azrael's colder, more rational approach, thought tainted by the loss of sanity… It's a lot of factors. It's basically about a character going mad, and that's something new for me. A leap from writing someone who can be very broadly described as "all brain and no heart", to an insane individual. It has been interesting, from both a personal and a technical point of view. I think I could fill an essay with these observations, but the aforementioned points are the important ones.
Also, some solace and gratification for those who wished Azrael damnation and hell in the first chapters.
There were a few links to The Assassin here, for those who have read it. And, while we're on that, that group is growing to quite a lot of people.