In addition to the evidence Delphine needed to be sure that the Thalmor were not responsible for Alduin's return, Fakhriya discovered a dossier on Ulfric Stormcloak that described his torture by their hands as a youth and suggested that the Stormcloaks were receiving Thalmor support in the civil war against the Imperials. She went for a walk to make sense of what she has learned.
The morning air was thick with the scent of sulfur from the thawing Karth River delta at low tide when Fakhriya set out to walk the streets of Solitude. It was still much too early for any of the merchants to be at their shops so Fakhriya walked through the Well District past the open air market in the direction of the Bard's College and then headed up to Castle Dour. As she expected, the soldiers were already training.
Before the war when Fakhriya had been studying at the Bard's College she sometimes liked to hang out at the edge of the courtyard where the Imperials did their morning drills before going home after a late night. She liked the precision and the pageantry of the soldiers at the changing of the guard.
Since the war started, the peacetime drills had been suspended to make time for endless training exercises. Young people from all over Skyrim had been flooding into Solitude to join the Legion. Few of the greenest recruits had ever held a sword, much less used one, before arriving at Castle Dour. The young farmhands turned soldiers were accustomed, however, to rising at dawn to do chores. The Legion encouraged that foothold on discipline by training the most recent comers early in the day. As the recruits gained experience they earned the privilege of rising later in the morning.
Fakhriya sat on the ground against the wall just inside the courtyard of Castle Dour and watched the young soldiers train. Most were boys, but there were several girls. At the far end of the courtyard, the teenagers practiced with dull steel swords against dummies. In the center of the courtyard, the kids were partnered to do drills against each other with wooden swords and shields. Closer to where Fakhriya was sitting, the young recruits were practicing archery.
None of the soldiers training that morning were any older than Ulfric had been when he wore an Imperial uniform. As she watched the kids do their exercises, Fakhriya couldn't help but speculate how any one of them would endure the torture Ulfric had. The descriptions had been sickening when Fakhriya read them in Ulfric's Thalmor file, but the horror took on a new dimension as she imagined one fresh faced recruit after another being subjected to the same experience. The images of the tortured man she had left behind at the Thalmor Embassy and the vision of the young soldiers before her comingled in revolting combinations in her mind. When the sight of the soldiers training with wooden weapons became entwined with the image of Malborn's dead body, Fakhriya decided she had had enough.
Fakhriya circled around the edge of the courtyard to a walled off alcove that had several rows of pews facing a pair of wooden thrones. The thick stone walls that isolated the alcove from the training area muffled the sounds of the exercising soldiers. Fakhriya walked down the center of the row of pews to a large wooden door at the entry to the Temple of the Divines.
When Fakhriya stepped inside she found herself at the back of an immense cathedral. The air smelled of lavender and incense. Rows of pews made of the same wood as the ones Fakhriya had passed outside, but with higher backs and ornate sprigs of lavender affixed to the sides, drew the eye to the chapel at the far end of the cathedral. The morning sun filtered through the high glass windows above the semicircle of shrines to the Divines.
Fakhriya had never considered herself a particularly religious person, but worship of the Divines had been an important part of her upbringing. Most humans - and even some mer - in the Empire revered all eight Divines, excluding Talos, but many found that they had an affinity for one or two in particular. Fakhriya's father, for example, devoted his most intense worship for Akatosh because of the similarities between the Cyrodilic god and the Redguard god, Ruptga, who her father had worshipped in his youth. Fakhriya's older sister aligned herself with the teachings of Julianos, who was the patron of logic and reason, and Zenithar, the patron of work. Her mother revered Kynareth, as the goddess was called in the Imperial pantheon, but practiced her worship in the Nord tradition. Fakhriya was partial to the teachings of Dibella and Mara.
Fakhriya liked to think that Dibella and Mara were two sides of the same coin. Both goddesses were associated with love. Dibella, however, was the patron of physical beauty, indulgence and promiscuity, while Mara was the patron of compassion and maternal instinct. In her desire to be a bard, and in her love of fashion, food and fun, Fakhriya sought guidance from Dibella in a practical sense, but in her hope for fairness and justice in the world, Fakhriya embraced the ideals of Mara. Fakhriya believed that the balance between the two goddesses was the path to honesty, truth and goodwill to all.
Fakhriya regularly wore an amulet of Dibella and often prayed for Mara's benevolence, but she couldn't remember the last time she sought out a shrine to either goddess. Recent events seemed to be rushing by Fakhriya like a swollen river through rapids. If she had ever needed divine guidance to help her navigate the current rather than be swept away by it, it seemed to be now.
As she reached the chapel, Fakhriya's eye was drawn to the only recess among the nine that did not contain a shrine. Talos worship had been outlawed for as long as Fakhriya had been alive, but she had never been confronted so directly with the absence of Talos among the Divines. In the Great Chapel of Talos in Bruma the shrine had been removed, but the statues and images of Talos were intact. Some of the families of her childhood friends had makeshift shrines to Talos hidden in a root cellar or in some remote spot on their properties. In her youth people had been careful to not speak the name of Talos too loud or too often, but Talos was present in the lives of many in Bruma. Fakhriya couldn't stop herself from feeling sympathetic to the Stormcloaks as she considered the empty space in Solitude's chapel.
Three spaces to the left of the empty recess where the Shrine of Talos once stood was the Shrine of Dibella. It was only as Fakhriya approached the shrine that she realized she had not brought anything with her to offer to the goddess. People traditionally left flowers, potions or gemstones at the shrines as offerings for the blessings they expected to receive. Fakhriya rummaged through her clothes and found a couple of septims. She knelt before the shrine and held one of the coins with both hands. With her head bowed, Fakhriya held the coin to the sky, kissed it as she brought it down and placed it in front of the shrine. She remained kneeling and meditated on a ritual prayer to Dibella. After about an hour, Fakhriya placed her hands on the shrine and petitioned Dibella for insight.
Fakhriya got to her feet and walked around for a while in the chapel to restore the circulation in her legs. As she paced back and forth, she noticed Rorlund, a priest of the Temple, replacing the sprigs of flowers on the pews in the chapel. He nodded at Fakhriya and bid her welcome. Fakhriya acknowledged him and then knelt before the Shrine of Mara and performed a ritual similar to the meditation she had done before the Shrine of Dibella.
As Fakhriya was finishing her meditation, she became aware of a conversation between Rorlund and a priestess, Silana Petreia.
"I feel many of Solitude's families are having trouble getting by," Silana Petreia stated, "but the wealthy do nothing to help them."
"Your compassion is admirable, but you see, we cannot help them all," Rorlund said. "The poor must learn from the examples of the gods and raise themselves up."
"I respectfully disagree, sir," Silana Petreia replied. "Stendarr and Zenithar may demand strength from them, but Mara and Dibella demand compassion from us."
Silana Petreia's words were like a splash of cold water to the face for Fakhriya.
Stendarr and Zenithar demand strength, but Mara and Dibella demand compassion.
Fakhriya wasn't exactly sure what to do with that insight, but she was convinced that Mara had answered her prayer. She left the Temple of the Divines with more joy and resolve in her heart than she had felt in a long time.
A different, clearly more experienced, batch of recruits was training in the courtyard when Fakhriya left the temple. She stopped to watch the soldiers for a while and then surveyed the courtyard for the commanding officer. A captain was barking commands and encouragement to some young archers.
"Captain," Fakhriya called as she approached the Legionnaire, "I hope you can help me. I would like to lend my support to the Imperial war effort."
On the front door of Angeline's Aromatics, an alchemy shop near the Winking Skeever, hung a flowery wreath. Fakhriya had seen similar decorations throughout Skyrim. Sometimes the ornaments were as simple as a few sprigs in a pot on a stoop, but most often branches of lavender or thistle were woven with tundra cotton into rings. The wreaths indicated that a member of the household was fighting in the civil war. Although the items constituting the wreaths were likely chosen because they were inexpensive materials found readily throughout the province, Fakhriya liked to think that the purple color represented a unified Skyrim without the political distinctions of Imperial loyalists, who marched under a red banner, or Stormcloak rebels, who marched under blue. Sadly, the wreath on the door of Angeline's Aromatics had red mountain flowers woven into it.
The red, done most commonly with snowberries in the colder holds or with red mountain flowers in more temperate holds, indicated that the soldier had fallen. Angeline's daughter had lost her life in a skirmish on the border between Whiterun Hold and the Pale early in the conflict.
When Fakhriya entered the shop she found Angeline, a Breton woman in her 60s, tutoring a young woman in potion mixing.
"Deary, go ahead and try the potion and you'll see what I mean," Angeline said to her student. "It won't kill you. Give it a taste."
The young woman looked apprehensively at Angeline and then took a sip of the potion. She scrunched her face in response to the taste and then opened her eyes wide as she reacted to the affects.
"Oh, that doesn't feel right at all," the young woman said.
"And it shouldn't," Angeline said with a smile. "Both histcarp and silverside perch have the effect of restoring stamina, but together they also have the effect of damaging stamina regeneration. Your mixture is neither a potion nor a poison, but a worthless combination of both. When a remedy damages as much as it repairs, it isn't much of a fix."
As the student returned to her notes, Angeline approached the counter to offer her assistance to Fakhriya.
"I haven't seen you around in quite a while," Angeline said. "Are you still practicing your mixing?"
"Actually, that's why I'm here today," Fakhriya said. "I was talking to Captain Aldis about how I could help the war effort and he recommended that I come to see you."
"Are you staying in Solitude, dear? I could always put a good mixer to use," Angeline said.
"No, I will be traveling, but I have some ingredients in storage in Whiterun that you might find useful. I hoped I could arrange to have them brought to you."
"That would be an immense help," Angeline said. "It is becoming much too dangerous for most of the young people who volunteer here to go out in search of ingredients. So many common things are becoming harder to come by and of course, as the war goes on, more and more soldiers need the relief the potions provide. Let me find my niece to help you. She can give you an idea of what is in the shortest supply and help you make your shipping arrangements."
Fakhriya felt pretty good about herself when she left the alchemy shop. After all, a person didn't have to be a soldier to contribute meaningfully to the war effort.