The Thief

Wrenched apart. Shattered.

Everything's bright-edged and slow, measured by the thud of your heart. You perceive it all with heightened vision: the close dark weave of their robes, the smallest flaws in that beam's woodgrain, the precise pattern of the flames swaying in the hearth …

…the minutest puncture wounds. The smallest splinters of exposed, white bone.

There's nothing recognisable, but you'd know him anywhere. He always had a presence, which the Black Hand's most savage ministrations can't dispel. And there are, you note with dreamy abstraction, lacerations on their skins as well. Blood oozing from the Altmer's hairline, jagged tears in the Breton's sleeve. He had not made it easy for them.

Wait, the Breton. There's something about him. Outwardly he's no more sinister than the others, but the moment his eyes meet yours, you see it. In a split second's flash you see the sanguine dart of madness break the calm surface waters; you see the man you know authored the journal, and this trail of carnage.

"You are like an unholy vision," is what he says aloud.

And you're a thief, some distant part of you wants to cry. You stole him from me.

Of course, they're all guilty of that. You won't be doing anything about it just yet, though.

The deep calm that has taken hold of you you won't recognise until much later for what it really is. But since profound shock is serenity's closest mimic, it carries you through the next half hour, allows you to speak civilly to them when you should be taking your blade and burying it in each of their throats, starting with Bellamont and not stopping until they are all as ripped and unrecognisable as he is.

Your face displays nothing as you listen to Arquen, who assures you in that throaty, monstrously serene voice, that all is well. That the betrayer Lucien Lachance has been dealt with.

And he really has, hasn't he. You drift towards the hanging corpse. "Lucien..." you say softly.

You want him to talk to you. He may not look like himself, but it's still him...and you want him to talk to you, this new and very different Lucien, tell you it's all right. But it's not, and now he, your Speaker, is silent, silenced, for good.

You become aware of a presence to your left, a voice. Banus Alor has taken your word for a query and is enthusing about his role in the slaughter. "...the four of us attacking him in unison...the flashing of steel, the spraying blood!"

You look at him incuriously. Blood. Lucien's lifeblood lavished across walls and floor, decorating their robes, pooling beneath his ruined corpse. You inhale deeply, and the full-bodied metallic tang rushes into your nostrils. It's heady, almost euphoric, like a drug. Your eyes are blank and dry, but if you wept now, your tears would fall and mingle with those red rivers, saline and sanguine, an estuary of grief and pain.

He can't speak, but if he could, he'd tell you that he had not disgraced himself - shouted, or pleaded for mercy - not even during the worst of it, the searing of spell-fire alternating with the bite of cold steel, Arquen's bubbling laughter somewhere close by all the while. He'd tell you that he spent the night holding grimly to the thought that you would come - only to pray, at the end, that you would stay away. Because in the final moments, Bellamont had come close, so close that only the two of them could hear his words:

Your Silencer will share your fate, he had whispered as he angled the blade and forced it deeper, parting flesh, touching bone.

"Almost poetic, isn't it," says Bellamont now, and fondly, and in your cool ephemeral detachment you have to agree. It's the perfect traitor's death, no pity and no dignity.

His eyes were an arresting deep brown. You've seen them alight with the pleasure and pride engendered by your own achievements. You've seen them icy and abstract as he ordered the deaths of the family. You've seen them black with rage. Now you get to see them vacant, rings of pale knife-chipped bone girdling raw nothingness.

Now was he alive, or dead when they did that? Do you really want to know?

* * *

Arquen is speaking again, something about the Night Mother and taking his place. The notion is nothing short of obscene. Lucien's place will never be filled.

The insulating effect is beginning to wear off. You want to scream your lungs ragged, but to do that you'd have to fill them with air first, and you can't breathe. Your hand slips towards the hilt of your sword -

But you stop yourself. You feel his eyeless stare on your back.

His last command to you hangs heavy in the air around the smell of his blood: unmask the traitor, save the Brotherhood. And isn't it a measure of his influence over you that his commands still hold sway, even when he's like this, chained and torn and divest of almost everything human?

You bow your head in acquiescence. Arquen smiles approvingly, and you step outside, closing the door gently behind you.

Past the lit lamp, past an exhausted, dull-eyed horse, past those five graves in their sombre crescent of cold stone, all utterly inconsequential. A few more steps, and you fall to the ground and vomit until there's nothing left to bring up.

It's almost dawn.

When you raise yourself shakily to your knees, hands splayed on the cold soil for balance, a flash of light strikes your eyes: the sun's first rays over distant Lake Rumare and the Imperial City. The tall white-gold spire, just visible through the trees, becomes a dazzling pillar of light which gathers the beams and deflects them back outwards, a radiant offering to the divines.

"Glory to Akatosh," you hear yourself murmur; the words form themselves unconsciously on bile-coated lips, a half-remembered reverence of childhood.

Lucien? He would have clouted you round the head for saying something like that.