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TW: panic attack
The sound that comes out of the Breton woman is inhuman. Vorstag has never heard anything like it. In all the moments of grief he has experienced, all the moments of death and despair he has witnessed, he has never heard a sound like this. It nearly knocks him on his backside as he sits there on one knee in front of her. He feels it steal his breath, cave his chest, constrict his insides. The cry is unlike anything a human can produce, animalistic, raw. It takes him a few moments to gain his composure. The woman begins spitting out words again, but this time, she is enraged.
"NO!" Her lips are in a snarl and the force behind her voice is startling. With her face arranged in such a riotous form, she truly does not appear wholly human. "She is alive. I carried her here. I carried her here and she was still breathing. I did not have any more…I did not have enough for…" she shakes her head and begins to yell louder now, "Where is the jarl's wizard? I demand to speak with him! BRING me the jarl's WIZARD!"
Her eyes are frantic, her chest is heaving. She stands and the change in position causes the dead woman's body to flop down against the cobbles. As the Breton looks around, Vorstag notices her hands are shaking, crackling with an energy that comes to life briefly, but fades away just as quick. Like a candle flame that is continuously snuffed out by wet fingertips, or a spark from flint that cannot catch fire, the magika that this woman so clearly possesses cannot be called forth.
"I need to…" She sways where she stands. "I must speak with…" Her body begins to pitch forward, her eyes roll back into her head. Vorstag lunges forward, propels his body using the strength of his bent leg, and catches her in his arms before she can crash to the hard ground. She lies limply against the breastplate of his scaled armor. Frabbi makes her way to his side through the crowd and shakes her head at the woman.
"Poor dear," she clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth three times, "frazzled beyond belief. Must be exhausted. Better put her up in the back room, Vorstag. The one on the right. Kleppr will go get Faleen and Brother Verulus, won't you, Kleppr?"
Her husband rolls his eyes and mumbles something about always being ordered around by an insufferable wench, but he goes off towards Understone Keep nonetheless. He takes the steps two at a time and soon disappears around the large stone pillars that create the keep's entranceway. Frabbi motions for Vorstag to follow her and the warrior looks down at the small woman in his arms.
"Her companion," he says. "She would not want us to leave her alone, I don't believe."
Breylin clears his throat and then offers, "I will stay with her. Wait 'til someone can take her to the Hall. I'll come back to inform you of where she has been lain."
Vorstag nods and turns to Frabbi. The older woman gives the unconscious Breton one more sympathetic look before turning towards the inn and striding up to the door. The seasoned mercenary lifts her up into his arms easily. Long years of being muscle for hire have molded his body, shaped it from the lanky, lithe form of an ignorant adolescent into that of a world hardened, wind beaten, time tested man. Even without his strength, though, he muses, he would have been able to lift the woman with no large effort. She weighs but a breath more than a feather, or so it seems to Vorstag. He wonders briefly when the last time she'd had a proper meal was. If she was one of those people who seemed to never put on any weight, well, The Reach would swallow her up in one mouthful. Might not even take the time to chew her up before gulping her down.
The Reach was no place for the frail, for the weak. It tested a person, repeatedly, until the trials either won or were adapted to. They never went away. A person just became stronger. Became nearly The Reach themselves. Remote. Resilient. As unmoving as the Druadach Mountains.
Wherever she came from, Vorstag thinks, it had not prepared her for this place.
Few people were ever prepared for The Reach.
When the exhaustion finally clears, she is roused by the din of raucous conversation and the smell of sweet-rolls. The sugary aroma makes her stomach grumble involuntarily, but she finds that her mouth is too dry to respond to the smell. She cannot salivate, can hardly blink. Her entire body feels bone dry, like a cloth that has been left out to dry for too long during Sun's Height. She feels cracked and stiff, sore and broken. Her muscles protest even the slightest of movements and all she has done so far is turn her head slowly to the left. Emerald eyes strain, bleary and red, to focus in on the room around her.
Cold, high stone walls surround her. Great slabs that were stacked one on top of the other encase the room. It is a distant feeling, an empty feeling, the stone walls around her. They are carved here and there with chiseled out images she cannot quite recognize. Dwemer, probably. She is unfamiliar with their kind, their history.
There are a few small wooden buckets near her. One is overturned and droplets of water slide out and drip, drop down onto the cool stone floor. The tear shaped bulbs turn the grey stone an even deeper color, colder even, somehow. There is a woven basket nearby holding what appears to be an unnecessary amount of potatoes. A rolled up rug lies in another corner behind her head. It has collected so much dust that she feels a sneeze well up inside her just by the look of it.
The slab of a bed she has been laid on is strangely more comfortable (if stone can ever be considered comfortable) than she expected. The pillow and blanket smell of stale mead. A lantern flickers on the table to her left. A wax candle barred in by metal framework slowly melts against the burning flame. The table is a harsh stone like the walls, like the bed, like nearly everything around her. She is surprised to find the single desk chair is made of wood.
Her memories have been blissfully absent until she sits up, feels the blood rush around in her body. It fans out from where it had settled, sloshes around in her head, down her limbs, makes her simultaneously cold and warm at the same time. Her hands tingle, her feet feel like they are being pricked with a thousand little sewing needles. Like a floodgate, like a torrent of unrelenting rain, the past two days come rushing back to her and she feels her mouth open by itself. Her lungs expand, contract, expand again. They fill with air. She sucks it all in, greedy, like an animal that has run all day, never stopping, trying to escape an enemy it has never seen but knows is behind it, following hungrily, jaws open and waiting for the first bite. Finally, she has found rest, respite from the unseen enemy. It terrifies her. The silence, the motionlessness, they threaten to pull her heart apart, rip it in two and smash it against the cold, stone walls that surround her, bind her, suffocate her.
Suddenly she cannot breathe. The air that was once sweet and desirous is now a constricting puff of smoke in her lungs. It has turned to ash and she is choking on it. She claws at her throat, at nothing that is there or can be seen by anyone looking at her. She feels it, though, ravaging her from the inside out. The memories. They tear at her like a bear shredding an intruder in her cave. What has she done to deserve this torture? Why do the memories grip her in such a vise? Like a hunter's snare? She is the prey. She is the intruder. The memories will devour her.
She will die in this stone room, inside these stone walls, on this stone bed.
It does not register to her that she is screaming until the impossibly large metal door to her room swings open with a bang! and a tall, beast of a man wearing scaled armor comes running in, his weapon drawn.
She is still screaming, and pressing her hands to her throat at the same time, as she scrambles back onto the stone bed and presses herself back against the hard wall. She attempts to put as much space as possible between herself and the stranger. Her screams die down and she is left gasping for the air that she no longer wants, that thick black smoke trying to poison her body and burn her from the inside out.
"Traveler," his voice is smooth, tempered, and she very briefly marvels that it has come out of such an imposing warrior of a man. "What is it? Who is here? I saw no one come in."
The light of the lantern cast about and against the stones of the room catches in her eyes. It bounces off the solid blocks and bathes the room in a warm glow that does not give off any heat. It is a deceptive warmth, but it plays against her eyes and makes them shine like new spring grass on a sunny morning during Rain's Hand. There are tears there, in her eyes, and they remind him of dewdrops on freshly dampened grass blades.
"Who…who…" She cannot form any words other than that. They are caught in her throat, in the growing pile of ashy dust that has sucked all the moisture from her body, that is slowly running her dry. She is a well that has been forgotten, left to wither and become overgrown, choked by vines and weeds.
Vorstag sees the panic clear as day on her face. Her eyes flit about the room, darting from place to place. He is sure that she is not looking at anything. Something is replaying in her mind. Her hand is at her throat and if he didn't know any better, he would say she looks like she is drowning without being in water.
"I-" He is cut off by Frabbi frantically running into the room.
"Oh, my, my, my, Vorstag!" She scolds him like he is a child who has swiped an extra biscuit at dinner, swatting his armored chest with her frail hand. "You'll scare her half to death."
She realizes her mistake after it is too late. The woman's emerald eyes grow into discs twice their size at the word death and her mouth prepares to open to launch out what is undoubtedly going to be another monumental shriek.
"No! No! No need for that, miss." Frabbi quickly begins speaking again, fluttering around the small room in a flurry, tidying things that don't mean anything to the woman curled up against the wall and that certainly don't need to be tidied. Vorstag stands like a pillar near the door, equal parts feeling confused and awkward as he looms half in and half out of the room.
"You've cried and shrieked quite enough for your vocal cords for one day. No, no," she repeats herself accompanied by a small shake of her head, "best rest your voice, now. The name's Frabbi," she continues. "My husband Kleppr and I own the inn – The Silverblood Inn, you see. We brought you here after you took a little spill. Do you need anything? Water? Vorstag, go get the miss some water, eh?"
Vorstag turns immediately to leave but takes one last glance at the woman from over his shoulder. She is staring right at him, her eyes unmoving, unwavering, as opposed to moments earlier when they had landed on nearly everything but him.
"You." She croaks out that single word and it stops his feet immediately. He turns back to her slowly, cautiously. He fears if he moves too quickly she will crush herself further into the wall out of fright. He doesn't know why he scares her, doesn't know why she stares at him like she has seen a version of him that has haunted her in some horrific way. He doesn't know why it causes a small knot of upset to form in his stomach.
"You," she says it over again and unfolds her feet from under her. Frabbi stands off to the side, unsure of what to do or what is happening.
The woman drags her body off the stone bed, and at last seems to notice she is still in her bloodied robes. Her hands are shaking as she inspects herself, gently runs her hands up and down her torso, looking for wounds, maybe searching for clues. Clues to what, Vorstag cannot guess. Her breathing becomes ragged once more, labored and pained. Vorstag sees her chest heaving up and down, up and down. It rises and falls quicker and quicker as she looks up at him, stares straight into his eyes again. Panicked and wide her own eyes are as she takes a few more slow, timid steps towards him. She stops when she is less than an arm's length away.
She is so small, he thinks. So small. The Reach will swallow her. It will. He is sure of it. How it hasn't already is beyond his comprehension. But he knows this place, this world he lives in, and he would bet all of his coin that The Reach would claim her. In one way or another this place would make her its own.
He watches her swallow and it is painful to see. She grimaces. He imagines her throat is like clay that has been baked in the sun for too long, crumbling into dust, from all the screaming, the long run from wherever she had come from. Raw and scratchy, her voice erupts from between her chapped pink lips.
"You…saw her."
Her voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, but he hears her, nods at her without saying a word.
"She is…" her chest keeps moving up and down, up and down, up and down, until she continues, "…dead?"
He hears her voice crack, shatter into a thousand tiny shards out into the air of the room. He wonders if it is painful. If it sliced her throat on its way out.
Vorstag cannot bring himself to speak. This woman that has just gone through something he cannot even begin to understand, could not even wager a guess on, has been able to pull sharp words from her shuddering body, and he cannot even get himself to say one.
He nods.
In an instant her emerald eyes disappear behind her eyelids and her entire body pitches forward. In an exhale that seems to deflate her limbs and cave in her chest, she falls, gravity intent on crumpling her into a heap, before Vorstag reaches out his arms instinctively to once again catch her. He holds her limp body in his arms for the second time that day and stares down at her, mouth slightly open, eyebrows knit together.
She is so small, he thinks again and again and again as he cradles her to his chest.
"Well." Frabbi's voice pierces the air. "I'll go get her some water. Put her on the bed, again, Vorstag. She's been through something. Don't know what it was, but it must've been bad."
Frabbi starts to leave the room but stops when she sees Vorstag staring down at the woman still, his eyes locked onto her face, his own expression screwed up into a sort of confused yet awed look.
"You sure do have a way with women, don't you, hmm? Have them fainting right and left."
He doesn't hear her joke as she exits the room. He can only continue to stare at her, this woman he has never met, knows nothing about, not even a name.
She is so small.
His fingers curl around her just a little tighter and it takes him a few more moments to lay her down on the bed again.
She is so small.
He looks at the way the stone bed nearly engulfs her figure and he thinks of The Reach. It is colder than the stone that holds her now, harsher too. It comes in like a thief but leaves like a siege. It takes what it wants and rarely gives anything back.
It will swallow her whole.
In that moment he can think of only one thing to say when he finally finds his voice.
"I will not let it."
A/N: Hope you enjoyed this installment of the story!
Vorstag has some past issues, our female co-protagonist has a mountain of mystery and issues, Frabbi hates her husband, and we still don't know who the dead woman is. What a time!
Let me know what you think! As always, let me know if I missed any errors. Much love.
Stay tuned xx