When Emrik woke, it was with a throbbing in the back of his mind that would have been on par with a firebolt bouncing around inside his skull.
He sat up groggily and looked at where he was, trying to piece together the events of the previous day.
Of course, he thought. I'm in Cidhna Mine.
Inside his cell he was surrounded by earthy walls. The cell was narrow and uncomfortable, even by prison standards. A thick-barred gate blocked Emrik from the rest of the mine, though outside he could see other prisoners toiling away with pickaxes while guards watched them like bone hawks.
Emrik soon came to realise that his clothes had been removed and replaced with rough garments that promoted itching. His bed wasn't much better: a wooden frame with a canvas mattress and no pillow.
A guard walked past as Emrik tried to clear his head. The guard noticed the awakened prisoner and stopped. She leant against the bars of the cell casually, mockingly, and addressed him.
"You can rot in here all you like prisoner," she said with the thick accent that was inherent to all Nords. "Cidhna Mine isn't like any other prison. You can't just wait for your sentence to finish up, oh no. You'll have to work like everyone else, earn your weight in silver, before the Jarl even thinks about letting you go."
The Nord laughed and continued on her patrol.
Emrik looked on as she walked away, a sneer painting his face.
He waited some moments before lurching upward from his bed. He went to the cell door and opened it carelessly, the ancient hinges creaking in protest.
The mine was bathed in the sickly orange glow of oil lanterns. The earth rose up around him on sides, and Emrik briefly felt a moment of taphephobia.
Guards lined the prison on wooden structures, watching the prisoners click and hack away at the earth around them with age-old pickaxes. The setup of the prison reminded him of some of the old bandit camps he'd seen before he'd met up with Ti'laan's clan.
"Stop gawking and get picking," a burly guard said from Emrik's side, thrusting a pickaxe into his hands.
Emrik briefly considered ramming the rusted metal into the guards' body. He figured he could kill half a dozen before he well and truly became a pincushion.
Holding in his frustration, Emrik made his way down to a spot of earth next to a malnourished, balding Imperial, and started mining.
He found the vein of silver ore easily, and with the strength he'd acquired from years of practicing with a sword and a boy, cut through the earth like it was soft clay.
He mined next to the man for some hours before he had an entire bucket of silver ore. He wiped his brow and went to pick up the bucket, then noticed that the Imperial prisoner had barely filled his at all.
Emrik looked around to make sure no guards' were looking. In a moment of compassion, he switched the buckets so that he had the barely filled one and the Imperial had the one filled with silver.
Emrik went back to work, hacking away at the earth, collecting silver from the walls and slowly filling his second bucket.
He heard a clink next to him and looked across, meeting the wide eyes of the Imperial who had not a moment before had hardly filled his bucket.
"Looks like you mined more than you thought," Emrik said, straining from the repetition of his task.
"I… I didn't do this," thee Imperial stammered. "I can't have."
"That bucket there begs to differ," Emrik replied, still mining.
"It was you," the Imperial said. "You did this for me. It had to be you!"
"I have no idea what you're talking about, friend."
"This bucket here will make up my sentence," the Imperial said, both anguish and joy showing in his tired eyes. "Thank you. Thank you! Please, if there is anything I can do for you –"
"Actually," Emrik cut in. "There is something you can do."
The Imperial nodded. "Of course, of course, name it."
"I desire an audience with the King in Rags."
Later that night, Emrik lay awake in his cell.
In all truth, he didn't know if it were night or not. The light of the lanterns trapped the mine in a state of eternal twilight, but considering how tired and how hungry Emrik was, he believed it to be one or two hours before midnight. This, and the guards were beginning to get lazy.
He heard a soft rattle at his cell and looked up, noticing the scrawny figure of the Imperial man from earlier.
"Come on," he whispered sharply. "The guards have passed out from their drink, but they won't be gone for long."
Emrik hurriedly met the Imperial man at the door, and with all the stealth he could muster, followed him deeper and deeper into the mine.
They eventually came to a gate. A guard was stationed out the front, but he slept heavily.
"Make sure the guard doesn't wake," the Imperial said.
Emrik nodded and positioned himself behind the guard, ready to put him in a chokehold at the first sign of alertness.
The Imperial extracted from his footwraps a lockpick, and began going to work on the lock.
The minutes that followed were agonizingly slow, but finally the Imperial got through when the lock of the gate clicked open.
"Got it, let's go."
Emrik followed the Imperial down a narrow tunnel.
"Why is there another gate?" he asked.
"The more hardened criminals are kept deeper in the mine," the Imperial explained. "The only way out is the gate we just went through. This tunnel makes picking off prisoners easy if there's a riot."
Of course, Emrik thought.
At last they came to a cavern. The cavern was thrown in the glow of Magelights instead of torches, and all around prisoners were either mining or – to Emrik's surprise – drinking wine.
"You see that gate over there?" the Imperial pointed to a gate across from them.
It was being guarded by a mountain of an Orc, whose brutish war paint and yellowed tusks inspired some kind of fear in Emrik. However, Emrik knew, this Orc couldn't possibly be as frightening as Guraag.
"That's where your King in Rags resides," the Imperial said. "Come. Follow me."
Emrik followed the Imperial as he stalked across the cavern.
They drew the gazes of the other prisoners until they came face to face with the Orc, who looked down on them with amusement.
"The guards didn't let you two in," he said.
The Imperial shook his head, and gestured Emrik to step forward.
Emrik did so.
"I desire an audience with the King in Rags," he said. "I come on behalf of my king, Ti'laan."
"Ah, the so called 'Bandit King'. Madanach assumed he'd come sooner or later," the Orc laughed.
Emrik let the Orc laugh.
"Ok, I'm sure Madanach would be more than happy to see you," the Orc said at last.
"Good," Emrik said, going to step forward.
"On one condition," Madanach said, putting a hand out to stop him.
Emrik sighed. "What's his condition."
The Orc pulled a shiv from his underarm and held it out. "Kill the Imperial."
Emrik almost gasped in shock, but held his composure. He looked across to the Imperial, who had become clammy and nervous.
"N-no. You can't, y-you won't… Would you?" The Imperial stammered.
Emrik looked from the quaking Imperial to the calm Orc, holding the shiv in his outstretched hand.
"I'm a free man tomorrow. You can't do this to me, you just can't," the Imperial said, breaking down into tears.
Emrik shut his eyes, and not for the first time, cursed the choices he'd made to wind up in this situation. He took the shiv from the Orc and forced himself to meet the eyes of the man he was about to kill.
"I'm truly sorry," he said weakly.
Before the Imperial could react, Emrik rammed the cold, jagged blade into his throat. The Imperial gargled, a look of pleading on his face as his lifeblood seeped out from the wound in his neck.
Emrik withdrew the blade and plunged it into the Imperials skull in the hopes that the Imperials death would be quick. He withdrew the blade and handed it back to the Orc. The body of the Imperial collapsed to the floor, bleeding and lifeless.
He was going to go free tomorrow. To a wife, to a child, he thought. But it had to be done.
"Very good," the Orc said, smiling cruelly. "I'm sure the King in Rags would be happy to see you now you've proven your worth."
He opened the gate, and Emrik entered.
A/N: Thanks for being so patient with me guys. School is still a thing for a few more days, but the holidays are coming up soon so I'm hoping for some free time to write. Hope you all enjoyed the chapter, and yay for ten chapters!
