Chapter 3: Home, Sweet Home

The was a Breton in the cell across from her.

There was also a guard leaning on the bars of said cell.

The guard she was sure hadn't been there before; the other prisoner she couldn't be sure of. The lighting was dim, and if he hadn't moved or made any sounds, she wouldn't have noticed his presence, not in the state she'd been in.

Grief rolled in her as she remembered what had put her in that state; yes, that feeling there would have been enough to distract her from a prone, unmoving figure in the shadows.

"If this is hell," the Breton said, his voice hoarse and rough, "It looks alot like prison."

The guard chuckled, and Ria's lips twitched upward for the barest fraction of a second.

"You're not in hell, Breton. You're in prison. Solitude prison."

Ria watched his face closely, more out of habit than interest. Confusion, and perhaps shock, flickered across it.

"I've been dead for ten days?"

"Twelve. It took a few days to heal you up."

She was only curious as to what had been healed for a few seconds; the Breton yanked his shirt up and stared down at his stomach. There was no question about it this time; he was shocked. Ria squinted and focused, and was able to make out a scar there. She cast her mind back to all the times she or a Family member had been injured, and how the injuries had looked when they'd healed. Her first guess of the cause was a sword, but she quickly changed that theory; a sword stab would be either vertical or horizontal (or somewhere in between), and no more than two inches across, tops. His scar was slightly bigger than her fist, and roughly the same shape.

If it was a sword, someone twisted it, she thought vaguely.

"Why would Maven keep me alive?"

So she can kill you slowly, Ria knew the instant she heard the name. She'd been to Riften once or twice, and every now and then the Brotherhood would get contracts from Maven Black-Briar. Ria herself didn't like the woman; something about the woman reminded her of Motierre, or perhaps Motierre reminded her of Maven, but either way Rai trusted neither of them very much. The only things one could count on those two doing were what all snakes do: bite.

"I told her not to bother, but she insisted." is the guard's response. "She's going to torture you Breton. For a long time, too. The next ten years of your life will be filled with pain, before she'll give you the sweet release that is death."

She should give the mighty Listener acouple lessons, Ria thought sarcastically; Lucian had the habit of getting overexcited and accidently killing his source of entertainment. It usually wasn't a problem, but every now and then they got someone who they needed information out of, and dead men don't talk.

After a second the guard added, with an annoyed countenance, "Don't bother with magic, Breton. This cell is covered in runes. You cast a spell and you'll receive three blasts of electricity. Nothing lethal, just enough to drain your magic. And cause you a great amount of pain."

Ria was slightly amused by how unhappy the statement made her dungeon-mate.

The Nordic guard pushed off the bars and walked for the door, obviously done with the conversation; she didn't try to ask him what her own fate would be. Assuming they knew only that she'd taken out several Oculatus agents and attacked Maro, there were two possibilities- execution or life in prison- and she could bring herself to care about neither.

"Where are you going?" the Breton shouted after him. The guard stopped but didn't turn.

"All I had to do was make sure you woke up. You have a week before Maven will be here for your little get-together." He continued to the door, but hesitated there, indecisive.

"If we're being honest, Breton, I'm proud of what you did. Jarl Black-Briar holds power, but she holds no favours with anyone in Riften. What you did was admirable, and I'm sad it didn't work."

Ria herself thought the Breton stupid; whatever he'd done to Blackbriar- and she had an educated guess by now just what it was he'd did- would have been suicide from the get-go.

Unless that was his goal, in which case he's doing remarkably well for himself.

"Then why don't you let me go?"

Ria could have laughed; the guard certainly did. Why would someone stick their neck out for a stranger, incur Maven's wrath, knowing the fate that awaited them if they did?

"Because I don't want to be in your boat."

With that, the guard made his exit.

That left Ria with only one point of interest in the place: the Breton. For a while, he lay where he was, staring at the ceiling. She took the time to observe him, and she recognized a look, a glint in his eyes.

What did Black-Briar do to you to cause that much hate? She wondered. She knew that look; she'd seen it in Jared's eyes, seen it in the eyes of her reflection. Her earlier guess of what the Breton had done was looking more and more likely, and though she doubted his sanity for it, she understood it. She and Jared had done the exact same thing, the only difference being they'd succeeded.

"I'm sorry," the Breton said quietly to the ceiling; his voice and his face were filled with something close to guilt. He lifted himself up with great effort, pain written over his features at the movement, and sat against the cell wall, glaring at his stomach and cursing. Then he began to look around at the faint runes painted onto his new home.
She was reminded of Jared for a second, not because the two men looked or moved similarly, but simply because of the action. If the roles had been reversed, Jared wouldn't be acting like a sniveling, instable wreck like she was; he would have done what the Breton was doing.

A familiar void opened in her chest, sucking away energy, senses, well-being. For a fleeting moment Ria contemplated driving her fist into the wall just to feel something.

It took her several seconds for her to notice the Breton's stare, and she met it; she could see the sympathy in his eyes, and she should have been angered by it. But she just stared back cooly, regarding him as he was her, both familiarizing themselves with the last somewhat-friendly face they would see before they died. The moment stretched on.
He looked away first; Ria guessed that she didn't look all that friendly after all. The thought brought a small flicker of amusement.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall, waiting. For what, she didn't know, but there was nothing else to do. She could have spoken to the Breton, but just the thought of social interaction made her tired, so she tried to sleep. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would dream of Jared again.

She didn't; she hovered somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, a place where she could only distantly perceive the world. Hours or minutes later, she was jerked awake when the guard- he could have been the same one from earlier, but it was impossible to tell with the helmet covering his face- slid a tray of food into her cell. Ria glanced at it, seeing a small piece of stale bread and a glass of murky water.

She stayed where she was, her appetite absent even before she saw the state of her dinner. They need to either kill me or let me go. I'm done with waiting, She thought, wishing, for the first time, for an opportunity to escape. If she could get out of here, she could at least find something to keep her mind busy.

The guard turned, bending to repeat the action with the Breton's food, and in that moment something appeared in front of Ria's cell.

She thought of it as a something because she had never seen a creature like it. Its back was to her, and its outline was indeed humanoid, but that's where the similarities ended. It was solid black, a maze of ebony veins just barely visible under its skin; any and all hair was absent from its body, and its hide was unnaturally smooth and unblemished on the surface. There was something wrong, something unnatural about it.

It was a being straight from the depths of Oblivion.

All this she took in in the instant before the creature let out a piercing screech and flung a haymaker into the guard's head, making his helmet ring and sending him sprawling onto his side on the ground. Ria came back to her senses at the noise, and scrambled for the far corner of the small cell, wanting to be as far away from the thing as possible.
The creature was on the guard instantly, wrapping its fingers around the Nord's neck and squeezing hard enough to make his eyes bulge. Ria was sure that'd be the end of it, but the guard drove his knee up into the thing's body with enough force to lift it slightly from the ground, making it loosen its grip. That was all he needed to throw the beast off him and scramble to his feet.

The Nord drew his sword, his back pressed to the bars of the Breton's cell as the creature leapt to its feet, crouched as though poised to leap. There wasn't much space between Ria's cell and those opposite of her, perhaps ten feet, and she could tell that this was going to be a close-quarter fight. Against that creature, she wondered how long the guard could last.

The demon howled and launched itself at the guard, only to collide with iron bars as the man sidestepped, slashing his sword. It caught the thing on the shoulder, but didn't stop it from twisting and throwing its body weight into the Nord, sending him crashing back into the bars of Ria's cell.
It was the first time the creature was facing her, and in the split second before it lunged for the guard, she saw that its face was lacking a nose or lips, and that its eyes held no irises or pupils; they were simply an oval-shaped expanse of blood-red.

Then the creature was surging forward, negating the distance between it and its enemy with blinding speed and throwing its hips into a blow to the head. Somehow, impossibly, the guard ducked under the strike, plunging his sword forward and up into its chest.
The creature's body went limp, slouching forward onto the guard and making him stumble back into the cell bars. For a minute, the demon and the Nord stare at each other in disbelief.

Then the things drove its fist into the guard's throat with inhuman force. The Nord gasped and choked, his windpipe likely broken, his face panicking. Ria saw a moment of clarity cross what she could see of his features, and he twisted his blade viciously.

The demon exploded.

One second it there, whole, its mouth opening in a silent moan of pain, and the next its skin opened up and what looked like black ash burst out with incredible force, coating everything in a five foot radius. The guard slumped to the floor, dead.

An eerie silence stretched out in which nothing seemed to be brave enough to move. After acouple seconds, when nothing else happening, Ria crept towards the front of her cell, not quite believing what her eyes told her.

All around, whatever that strange ash had touched was considerably worse for the wear. Cracks raced across the floor where the demon had stood, and the places where the ash had contacted the bars of the cell had rusted instantly.

Her heart beat a little faster, and she lashed out with a powerful kick where grey iron had turned red. The weakened section of the bar snapped off and skidded out towards the opposite cell with a clang of metal. Then she kicked out a second bar, dropped to the ground, and army-crawled through the gap.

She came out with the dead guard on her left, and that was when the smell hit her nose. It wasn't an altogether unfamiliar odor; in her line of work, the smell of rotting bodies was commonplace. The problem was that she'd never, in all her time as an assassin, had a body smell this bad so soon after death. When she climbed to her feet, giving her a better view of the front of the corpse, she saw why.

The entire chest, stomach, and the front of its legs had all been converted, rather heavily, in ash. In related news, there was no longer any flesh on those areas. The legs were nothing but bones pockmarked and cratered by rot; the stomach was non-existent, the flesh gone and a pool of reddish-black gunk pooled between his hollow hipbones and spilling over onto his lap. His upper torso was in nearly the same skeletal state, every rib completely showing, the only flesh still hanging on decayed to a blackish color and clinging onto where ribs met spine.

Ria noticed all this as she swept a quick eye over him, unfazed by the gore, looking for possible supplies; she would very much like a weapon incase she ran into any other guards. But his Stormcloak armor had been reduced to nothing more than scraps of blue cloth and leather, and his sword was now a length of rusted metal that was a foot shorter than the blade out to be.

"Bother and befuddle," Ria growled, quoting the Keeper in her annoyance; having spent years living with him meant that his phrases had started to slip into her vocabulary.
The one thing she did see still intact was a ring of only-slightly-rusted keys on the ground next to the corpse's hip. She hadn't seen or heard them before, so she assumed a leather pouch or pocket had protected them from the worst of that strange dust.

She picked them up, looking them over; if her past experience in this place was anything to go by, they were to unlock the cells and not the chest of confiscated possessions. No, that key was bigger than these ones. She took them anyway, figuring that she could get acouple septims if she pawned them to the right people.

Ria rose and turned on her heels, her mind now on the door and the path she would need to take to get out of the place. But something made her stop and look at the Breton. He might not end up being the last person she saw, but she would probably be the last he saw- well, besides Maven.

Motierre and his contract had gotten her into this mess, had brung Maro's hatred onto the Family and had resulted in Jared's death. Ria hated him, and she hated Maven for how similar they were.

The Breton was gaping at the decimated body, and it was only the clang of the keys finding their way onto the floor of his cell that made him meet her gaze.

"If you're want to kill a Black-Briar, Breton, you're going to have to catch them outside the Keep." She said. For the few minutes she thought of how she'd do it, she'd thought that the best chance of success- and survival- would be a long-ranged attack or an ambush; whenever she'd been to Riften, Mistveil Keep had been too heavily guarded to be able to get to anyone important.

She turned and walked for the door, not waiting for a thank-you and not wanting one. She didn't do it out of kindness. She didn't know why she did, honestly, but it wasn't for that.

Now, she thought, to get my stuff back.


Ria slipped in through the sanctuary door, exhausted and hungry. After getting her things and slipping over the Solitude battlements onto a pine below, she'd cut down to a an Orc stronghold to buy some food and hide from anyone following her; she was welcome there for doing a job for the chief acouple years ago.

She'd spent a day there before continuing on to Markarth, cutting through the wilderness and doubling back for hours on end to shake any tails before continuing on to Falkreath. She felt lighter than she had in days; the exercise was helping to keep her mind focused and away from her grief.

But the adrenaline was wearing off, and her mind was starting to return to places it shouldn't't. She walked deeper into the sanctuary, coming to a space occupied by acouple bookshelves and a map-covered table. She ducked into a left-hand door, emerging into Lucian's office.

He was sitting behind a desk facing the door, reading over a ledger. The Listener's race was something that Ria could never pinpoint. His face was almost Nordic, but his sharp cheekbones, dark hair, and slightly-tanned skin spoke of Breton heritage. Age was another uncertainty about this one; he could have been at once twenty-five and forty, though if he were the former that would put him at a year younger than Ria.

Lucian looked up as Ria entered, a friendly smile playing over his face. It vanished the instant he saw the expression on hers.

"What happened? Did everything go alright?"

"The Emperor's dead, if that's what you're asking." She said dryly.

The Listener sat up alittle straighter, trying to see around her; Ria though that he finally seemed to be getting the idea that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

"Where's Jared?"

"Dead." Ria said flatly. Lucian's eyes went wide; he was on his feet instantly.

"What!? How? Who?"

"Maro got ahold of him." Ria's eyes darkened as the memory flashed across her mind. "I couldn't get to him in time."

Lucian swallowed hard, seeming to register the shock; the Family was a family to him, and the deaths of his Siblings had always hit him hard. In Ria's mind, it was part of what made him a good leader. "And Maro?"

"Stabbed in the gut, but alive."

The Listener took a deep breath. "What of Motierre? Did you get the payment?"

Anger flashed through Ria's eyes, the kind of anger that made an assassin dangerous. "My apologies, but the payment seemed like a second priority to my survival."

"You're an assassin, you can survive the trek across Skyrim." Lucian shot back, annoyed with his subordinate's tone.

"It's not the journey that's gonna kill me, it's the goddamn demons."

Lucian perked up at that, and a sudden look of keen, predatory interest flashed through his eyes; Ria half expected one of those sharp smiles to make its appearance. But he covered the look up so quickly that she wondered if she'd imagined it.

"What do you mean, demon?"

"Do I look like an Oblivion expert? I don't know what the damn thing was, and I'm not volunteering to go find out."

"Tone, Ria." Lucian warned.

"What about it?"

Ria could tell she was starting to grind on his nerves, but the Listener was holding his temper down. Sociopath though he may be at times, he cared for the Family, and he was something of a friend to Ria; meaning that he wasn't going to snap too viciously at her so soon after Jared's death.

"Nevermind. Go get some rest, I'll send someone up to Whiterun for Motierre."

"No!" Ria said instantly. Lucian shot her a questioning look, and she quickly composed herself. "No, I want the work. Free time isn't exactly my friend at the moment."

Lucian studied her for a moment, evaluating. "Very well." he said, pulling a piece of paper from under the ledger. "If you're going to Whiterun, we just got a contract from Black-Briar this morning. All the details are there. If you're feeling up to it, I'd like you to take care of it."

Ria took the note, her lipping curling into a snarl. She liked neither Motierre nor Maven; it was a good thing she was going to kill one of them very soon. It might not bring happiness, but it would keep her from ever coming into contact with Motierre again, and perhaps the adrenaline rush of fleeing the guards would keep her mind off certain things.

"I'll just grab acouple things and head out, then." She said, tucking the note into a pocket. Lucian nodded his approval and dismissal, returning to his record-keeping. She turned to go, but stopped in the doorway, adding, "If it's possible, I want Jared's body. And a shot at Maro."

The Listener nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

Ria plunged into the Sanctuary, heading straight to the bedrooms. Several of her Siblings greeted her or tried to start conversations, but she ignored them. She didn't want to talk; let Lucian announce Jared's death while she was away. She didn't want to acknowledge that it'd happened, let alone talk about it.

She stopped at the doorway of the men's rooms, glancing to Jared's bed and feeling her eyes start to sting with tears. She blinked them away as she continued to her the women's quarters, filling a knapsack with food, acouple simple iron daggers to use as throwing knives, and her personal ledger.

The moon was starting to rise as she climbed into a cart in Falkreath, tipping the driver extra to travel at this time of night. If they made good time, dawn would find her in Whiterun.