"Where," Crylas enunciated clearly, obviously doing his best not to sound as drunk has he was, "do evil souls go when they die?"
It was late at night, in the last days of Last Seed. In one of his episodes the Dragonborn had drunk until he was almost completely hammered. It was an all-time first though, for someone to witness it. All the other times, he had headed to one of his estates in the country, far from the cities, to drink. But this time, for some reason, he found himself in Breezehome, his faithful Housecarl watching him drink himself into a stupor.
"That depends on in what way they were evil, I suppose, why?" Lydia answered the seemingly random question.
"What does it depend on?" Crylas said, throwing an empty bottle to the ground and opening a new one.
"Well, if you're a werewolf you go to Hircine, a vampire to Molag Bal, a Dark Brotherhood assassin to Sithis-" she started.
"- what about a kinslayer?" the drunk interrupts her.
"I... I don't know. Why do you ask?"
"I still hear them, their cries. They all ask me why... I didn't understand them before, but I hear and understand them now... I understand..." Crylas trailed off, and took another big swig from his bottle.
"Who do you hear?" Lydia said compassionately, silently wondering what this had to do with kinslaying, but assuming it was just a drunk tangent.
"The Dragons. Their Voices go on and on... I always hear them, I can't sleep, I can't focus!" he shouted and threw his empty bottle at the wall, instantly grabbing another.
"What do you mean?"
"I devoured their souls... Their souls are inside me, and they know what I did. 'Druv Zeymah', they shout, 'Druv drey hi grut zey!' and other things. They all sound so pained..."
"What do those things mean?" Lydia asked, understandably not as well-versed in Dovahzul, the language of Dragons
"Why brother! Why did you betray me?" and Lydia fell silent.
"And I can't make them stop." he said in a small voice, and passed out.
Lydia had absolutely no idea what to do. This was not part of her training as a soldier. This was not part of her training as a Housecarl. What in Oblivion was she going to do when he woke up?
Putting that aside for the moment, Lydia focussed on immediate needs. She dragged her Thane up the stairs to his bed, and she laid him in it. She headed back downstairs after that, to clear up the broken glass and empty bottles that the Dragonborn had left behind.
All of that attended to, she sat down and thought. What was she going to do the next morning? Should she ignore it, pretend it hadn't happened and go on as they had? But that went against her sworn oath as a Housecarl, to bear her Thane's burdens, physical or otherwise.
She doubted though, that any other Housecarl had had a problem quite like this one. She had almost made up her mind to just leave it be, see if it happened again, when she heard noise from upstairs, where her Thane slept.
He was writhing around in his bed, muttering loudly all the time. "Krosis, Krosis! Zu'u drey ni mindok! Unslaad Krosis!" he almost seemed to whimper.
Lydia didn't know most of those words, but she knew 'Unslaad Krosis', it being an often uttered phrase by Draugr that she had asked Crylas about out of curiosity. 'Eternal sorrow'. The closest thing Dovahzul, the Dragon Language, has to an apology.
And she knew, she couldn't leave him to suffer alone.
Author's note: I was being bothered by the whole "Soul of a Dragon, Magic of Dragons, now go kill them all!" thing, so I decided to punish Crylas for killing all his kin. On a side-note, wouldn't it be awesome if you could join the Dragons? Same with Oblivion, if you could join the Mythic Dawn, and, by extension, Mehrunes Dagon, that would add so much fun! If I get enough (read: any) reviews, I'll write the follow up!
