Author's Note: so I herd u liek disclaimers?
Thanks so much for all your reviews, people. :D Really makes my day.
Dreamer – M'aiq doesn't have a quest; I just wanted him to cameo, because he's insanely fun. :D As for the foreshadowing – just stay tuned, hehe.
Arty – First off, reviews isn't a sign of good writing, it's a sign of a popular topic. While not quite as fangirled as Lucien, Vicente is one of the most popular characters in Oblivion; hence, more people will read my story if they know it's about him. That's all there is to it. And haha, I almost forgot you're naked in the Dreamworld; that was one of the last-minute edits I threw in.
Fan and Lovecat – Yay, more reviewers! I hope you enjoy what's coming next.
NoSoundComes – Really? Thank you! In all honesty, I thought that section was kind of rushed. I wanted to get a chapter up :P I was falling off the first page.
DualKatanas – Haha, M'aiq is amazing. (roflmao, what if Ray tried to off him and met the 'essential tag'?) And I have a cat nibbling at my jeans right now, actually. As for the contract... I'll let you read on and find the significance. :D Also, Avielle may learn something from Henantier's training ground that makes her less pissed off when she wakes up. But yeah, I'd have to say it was a move laden with consequences. Kud-Ei must not know her enough. Silence spells... In my Oblivi-universe, they almost always mean that you can't make a sound, and that your magic is cut off. However, the Dreamworld is a strange place, and the restrictions it imposes upon one are usually mental, as is the entire place, so they're not constrained to typical manners.
"Wake up! We've got to get out of here!"
Avielle groaned, blinking stars from her eyes. Disoriented wasn't an apt enough way to describe how totally 'out of it' the Breton felt; the entire world was spinning around her. Where was she? Who was talking to her? Why did somebody have a hand on her shoulder, and why was that shoulder bare?
Oh.
"Get your hands off of me, you perv!" she yelled, swatting Henantier's arm away as she jumped to her feet. And then she crouched down again, trying to cover her less socially displayable facets without much success. "And get me some damn clothes, will you?"
"I can't find any," the Altmer apologized, taking a step back. He'd never meant for his dreams to be so... awkward. "If it's any consolation, I'm trying not to look."
Avielle sighed. "Well, you're in your right mind again. No thanks to you. So can you tell me how in Oblivion we get out of this place? Because it's not my idea of a vacation spot, nude men and all. Actually, nude men especially."
"I, ah, err..." Henantier frowned. He could feel it, that elusive knowledge, just hovering outside of his grasp. But whenever he made to reach for it, it slipped away from his mind like mist. Everything was dark and confusing. "I don't remember."
"What?" The Breton's eyes nearly popped out. "Look, goldenrod, I didn't get myself nearly killed to hold a civil conversation with you. Well, actually, I did, but right now I really doubt you can help me. I just want to get out of this place. Try again."
"I can't," he apologized. "It's just... I don't know. Like I can see, but I can't see. I feel better than before, but I'm not... complete? Yes, I'm not complete. Something's back, but not all of it."
"I should have known," the girl muttered, half to herself, gazing at the ceiling. "Only one insane test wouldn't be nearly enough. It never is." She looked down, back to Henantier. "So you know a way out of here, but you can't remember it because your mind has more holes in it than a block of cheese. I found your courage. What else are you missing? I don't really want to spend any more time in this place, so get to work."
"I..." The Altmer closed his eyes, his brow furrowing. "I don't really know. Something. Maybe more than one something, maybe not. I feel like... I can see, but I can't. Like I'm blind and I'm not blind, like everything's swaying and falling and doesn't make sense. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"No, but I do understand that you're completely useless."
"Sorry."
"You should be."
"If it's any help..." The Altmer hesitated. "When you came back here – out of nowhere, I might add – and I started to comprehend things again, I noticed that this giant door was by that wall, and then it just disappeared. There was this jolt, and another door appeared where that one window used to be. There's something written on it, but I can't understand it, and when I tried to open it, I couldn't."
Avielle followed his pointing finger and saw that there was indeed another door, past the ghoulish alchemy displays and toppled shelves. She made her way over to it. It was wooden, unlike the first one, but the same bold scarlet letting displayed 'Perception' on the planks. Well, if that was another thing the moron was missing, it would make sense. But this was his own mess, and why was she doing all the hard work?
She tested the handle. "It's not locked," she noted. "Why don't you get your own mind back, make yourself useful?"
Henantier looked surprised. "Well... all right." She stepped out of the way, and he made to open the door. However, the knob wouldn't turn an inch in his hand, no matter how hard he pulled. "Are you sure it's unlocked? It seems stuck to me."
The Breton rolled her eyes, exhaling an exasperated sigh. "The fact that a girl is stronger than you is pretty pathetic, Altmer. Let me try."
She turned the knob and heaved the door open with much more strength than necessary – she was getting frustrated with this whole rescuing business. Were the victims always supposed to be so unutterably helpless? It was almost impossible to imagine that Henantier would ever be capable of aiding her.
Unfortunately for her, she pulled with so much force that she overbalanced and staggered, right into the blackness of the Test of Perception.
0o0o0
Vicente's poison was good for slipping into glazes, sauces, and sweet things, where its flavor would easily mingle.
Sadly, this did not include eggs, which Vicarus Astellus appeared to enjoy for breakfast. Sithis would have to be patient.
Vicente had expected Astellus to take a sweetroll, since a batch of them had been filling the kitchen with their honeyed aroma when he'd snuck inside, but he hadn't poisoned them simply because he had no idea which the noble would take. Having everyone in the house die of the Blight at the same time would rather kill the illusion he was trying to create. The Watch could be incredibly stupid at times, but some ruses were just pushing it.
However, he'd managed to find an extremely useful item before a servant had headed for the kitchen, forcing him to leave and hide. More specifically, it was a menu of sorts, telling the hired help what to cook for the day and what ingredients to use. Everyone was having soup for lunch, which was hardly in his favor. Considering this was probably served from one tureen, he'd have to cross that off his list of possibilities, lest he poison everybody. But dinner was the Night Mother's luck upon him; everyone in the household was having roast boar, but apparently Astellus was fond of a special gravy that none of the other diners wanted. In other words, he could slip in the poison as something was being prepared, rather than having to wait until dinner was served – which could be very challenging, even with invisibility.
He hadn't taken the list with him; it would have been suspicious if the servant had known to expect it, and if they hadn't, they might have prepared something else. Vampirism lent him a nearly photographic memory, if he chose to focus on things. Simply knowing that the sauce he had to poison contained hints of shein was enough for him. He'd be able to scent it out when need be, and that would be that.
The vampire watched from a second-floor closet. From the dust it had gathered – Vicente was glad that his kind had no compulsion to sneeze – he derived that it was seldom used. It was close to the center of the house, and almost directly above the kitchen. A perfect vantage point if walls did not deter you. He leaned back, shifting into as comfortable a position as he could, letting his immanent life detection monitor the house for him.
Over time, Vicente relaxed into a passive-alert state. He was at the ready if anything were to happen, but with his location secure and the house's occupants milling about so predictable, he was able to sit back and consider other things besides his task at hand. His mind began to wander – first to what Lucien was playing at, seeing how straightforward his contract seemed to be going, and then from the topic of Lucien, it chanced upon a figure whom he had not given much thought to in quite some time.
He would have thought, after that last explosive confrontation and five months of separation, that he would have been able to put her out of his mind. But the fact remained that his curiosity, so rarely piqued, had latched onto her. Who was she, to think that she could challenge the hands of Sithis himself? She was a paradox, both infuriating and mesmerizing; Vicente had met plenty of the the zealous-but-overconfident-and-unprepared type in the Brotherhood, but she was somehow different from them. And the irony that he'd saved her – he, an assassin – when she had a fair enough reason to completely loathe him. Yes, everything about her was a paradox. He recalled her face from the shadows of Skingrad Castle Hall, with the torchlight gilding the vertices of her face. Had those too-round cheeks thinned out a shade, giving her angled features their potential regality? Did that chestnut hair still flow down her back like a dark waterfall, and were her eyes wide and fearful, or did they blaze with that entrancing blue determination?
Had he been in a position to make a sound, he would have sighed. What was he thinking? Vampires were generally not successful romantics. Then again, he supposed that with the lack of variety he generally saw, any woman lacking fur or a tail would start to look good. Romance within the Brotherhood itself was rare, seeing as the ties of the Family were very close to the bonds of a true nuclear family, and even closer feelings definitely came with their fair share of awkwardness. That sort of love was something Vicente hadn't felt since before his death, and he was fairly sure that he wasn't feeling it now. The girl was simply... interesting. Enormously. It was a shame she was so ill-disposed towards the Brotherhood, as he would have enjoyed somehow recruiting her and honing her poorly-tapped talents into fine tools of Sithis's holiest art.
He wondered if she was still following her vengeful, ill-starred calling, or if the Void had finally stolen her without him to fend it off. She certainly seemed to have a penchant for death.
Hmm, he mused, absentmindedly watching the glows of the living wandering around him. I wonder where she is now?
0o0o0
Darkness. Pure, utter darkness. Avielle couldn't see a thing; she blinked frantically, but there was nothing obstructing her eyes. There was just nothing to see. Something ticked and clanged in the background, a jarring rhythm that reminded her of an off-beat clock.
She got to her knees, putting out a hand to feel around. There was nothing ahead, so she slowly crawled forward, unwilling to stand up, lest she lose her balance or run into something. She twisted her head around in desperation. Was there anything to see?
There was, apparently, as she looked to the left. A vaguely familiar ball of blueness glowed and spun to her left, lending no light to her surroundings, but quite visible in its own right.
Relief nearly overwhelmed her. It made sense that courage would have a hard test – after all, it was courage, and that meant being courageous or something. Perception was just seeing, feeling, noticing. All she had to do was get her bearings in the darkness and crawl through the abyssal lighting to reach his perception. Much more straightforward, even if initially frightening. She turned towards the floating sphere and began to make her way forward.
She managed to travel about three meters towards the ball before the ground vanished under her elbows, and she pitched forward with an involuntary scream, barely managing to keep from falling on her face. Avielle scrambled backwards, her heart racing. What was that? Her cry echoed eerily in the cavernous darkness. As steadily as she could, she reached a hand forward, feeling where the stone dropped away. She felt her way down, trying to feel where the chasm ended. Soon, her entire arm up to the shoulder was under the gap, and no bottom was in reach. If she leaned in any farther, she would have fallen over, so she pulled back, frowning.
Did she have to take a blind leap and hope that there was something underneath? She almost did, but some nagging instinct in the back of her mind spoke against it. She needed to get her mind out of the last test. Such a thing would have made sense for courage, but now she was retrieving perception, and what she was percieving was that there was nothing there, save a dead end and a fall. To continue forward would be denying perception, and probably failing the trial. Was this some sort of maze in the dark? She felt among the ledge, but couldn't find any stretch of ground beyond that she could continue on.
I'm going about this the wrong way, Avielle realized. I've got to be missing something.
She backed away cautiously from the gap, craning her neck around to see if there was anything else visible, anything else to give her a hint. If she had her magic, she could bring up a light to illuminate the entire blasted test. As she groped in the darkness, a dark thought dawned on her – a thought that she'd only touched upon once before, in another dark place where death had grasped for her.
Without her magicka, she was helpless. Useless. Perhaps even nothing.
Had she learned nothing, over these past few months? She wanted to be able to save herself. It was darkest irony that she'd come to rely on the aid of one of her deepest enemies. She remembered the vampire's apathetic, even icily proud face as he'd admitted to being a murderer, the grace at which he'd danced with his glass blade, the whispered comment in her ear. And please, do take better care of your life.
Even if she wanted his help – which she dearly did not – Vicente was hardly going to appear in the middle of somebody's nightmare to save her. When she'd told him to get out of her life, he'd surprisingly obeyed, leaving her with an entangling request-slash-threat – one that she'd followed out of some scrap of twisted gratitude she'd felt towards him for saving her life twice over. With his secrets kept, she could lay those debts to rest and continue on with her mission, and she'd never seen him again. She had nobody to rely on but herself, and only when stripped of her metaphorical crutch did she realize that she barely could walk. She was completely at the mercy of Henantier's dreams.
And Avielle did not want to be at anyone's mercy.
A flame appeared from nowhere, casting a small ring of shadows scurrying. Her eyes widened. Away from the ball of light, and closer to where she'd started out, was a torch. She wasn't sure how she'd missed it before, unless it had only just been lit.
Gingerly, she crawled towards it, very careful to feel the stone before she moved. There were no more chasms, and soon she was pulling herself up to her feet, grasping the torch by its handle.
The first thing she noticed was that the dream-torch was hardly comparable to the torches she'd known in the real world. The flame burned, merry and bright, but it barely illuminated the ground beyond her feet. Closer to starlight than firelight, its wan light was mordantly fitting for a nightmare's highest point. It was much better than nothing, though. With the light in her hand, she slowly walked back to to the gap, lowering her torch to the ground to see how deep the pit had stretched.
She remembered how she'd considered jumping down it, and she flinched.
There was nothing there, just an abyss that stretched down into impenetrable blackness.
She could see Henantier's perception taunting her. It was bobbing above a dimly lit podium, a circular platform, but the chasm stretched between her and it. So how was she supposed to get to it?
She held the torch as high as her arm could reach, trying to cast the light as wide as it would go. There it was – directly behind her was a bumpy, almost stair-like path that twisted and wound into the darkness. There were no rails, just two flanking abysses. But if there was one thing about the Dreamworld that she'd learned, it was that there was no way out other than forward.
By the Nines, if only she could manage to trap the Dark Brotherhood in this place...
As she carefully made her way across the jagged path, she noticed small, clear crystals were suspended in midair. They winked in the wan firelight, shimmering along diamond-cut facets. They looked oddly familiar, although the Breton couldn't quite place where she'd seen them before. What were they, anyways?
That became clear very quickly; Avielle, who was looking up rather than down, stumbled as her foot hit a slightly raised bump on the stone. The next thing she knew, all of the gems were glowing an ominous red. The frost spell they carried was so powerful that water vapor around them condensed, clouds of crimson in their bloody light. Avielle swore – these things were usually found in Ayleid traps. Get too close and set off a trigger, and one of them would launch a spell at you.
In this case, though, it was closer to... twenty. That she could see. And the humming was getting louder.
Avielle ran.
She darted across the erratic walkway, her torch threatening to go out as it flickered in the slipsteam. One by one, the traps launched their frost spells, creating a trail of scorch and ice on the ground behind the fleeing Breton. One bolt passed so close to her that she felt the beginnings of frostbite on her neck. Such a dash caused her to throw caution to the wind, and more than one time she stepped upon another press plate, causing the lines of cursed crystals to fire at her repeatedly. Avielle was not an athlete, and it was sheer providence that she managed to stay even inches ahead of the onslaught, lungs burning and limbs aching.
Eventually, she reached a circular platform where no more of the Ayleid traps were visible. She took a moment to catch her breath, panting as she rested her palms on her knees. Looking back at how thin and rutted that path had been, she was amazed she hadn't fallen off in her mad scramble. The entire surface was slick with ice now, and wouldn't be possible to traverse even if she'd wanted to. Rubbing her frozen neck, she glanced around. She was farther from her goal than she'd started from, and she hoped that it hadn't meant she'd gone the wrong way.
There was no space for second-guessing, so she turned her attention to the next stretch. She was at the beginning of a disc-shaped walkway, with the center missing; in essence, there were two arced paths that curved away and then rejoined at the end. Unwilling to run into another trap, she glanced up, lifting her torch. It was good that she had. Something like a network of bones were suspended in the air, with blades like enormous cleavers hanging under them. Even as she watched, the ones nearest to her began to swing, deadly pendulums dancing back and forth.
...Yep. Not that she needed to check, but this was definitely proof that she was in a nightmare. Giant suspended knives, check. The last thing Avielle wanted to do was navigate around them, especially when she had no room to dodge to the side. But if she sat around and waited, a giant triple-headed sweetroll with claws and an axe would probably appear from behind and start hacking at her neck. Or something.
She allotted herself about thirty seconds to do what mages did best – observe and hypothesize. What she came up with was that the cleavers swinging on the right-hand side seemed to be a hint faster than their counterparts on the other side.
She waited until the first blade to the left had just passed, inhaled a long draught of air, and darted past. It was actually fairly easy, although her heart pounded madly. The blade hadn't even reached its peak height before she made it through, and defined well by the feeble torchlight, the swinging axes were fairly distanced from each other. She had ample room to rest. Avielle made it past the other two in a similar fashion, feeling somewhat more confident but still quite wary.
The path turned a bit before coming out onto a squared-off plateau of brown stone. Recognising it as a probable source of traps, Avielle lowered her torch and investigated the ground without actually touching it.
Unfortunately, this stroke of genius was offset by the fact that the fire's heat set off the gas vents now clearly visible, scattered amongst the ground.
Crap.
Avielle didn't have much time to decide on a course of action. The platform wasn't very large, as she could already see the end of it. If she waited for the traps to run out, it would be easier to travese... but this was a dream – what if they didn't? And it was bound to spread. Already, her skin was beginning to prickle. Waiting around could be deadlier than trying to cross.
Moving as quickly as she could seemed to be becoming a defining aspect of this test; she inhaled a deep breath, already laced with minute amounts of poison, and dashed through the spreading greenish haze. It burned her body like acid, dilute as it was, and the small amounts she'd breathed made her want to choke. Definitely nasty stuff; when she reached the edge of the platform and no more vents could be seen, she kept on running, disregarding all possible traps, until the poison was far behind her and she could hold her breath no longer.
She fell to her knees, choking and spitting. Avielle had tripped some similar traps in old forts and ruins, but she'd never seen any gas as vicious as this one. Even after she had gotten back on her feet, her legs were shaking, and a rash had begun to appear on her skin. She halfheartedly tried to summon a healing spell, and was unsurprised when no effect would come. Oh, to have magicka again...
Avielle set off again, this time with a slight limp. The torch was starting to sputter, having been badly affected by the chemicals, but for once, the curving, jagged path was clear. Bright crystal formations glowed in the air; they looked benign enough, but the Breton didn't take a single step without checking for pressure plates or other suspicious giveaways beneath her feet.
Luck seemed to toy with Avielle, however. It often kept her on the verge of disaster, tossing her into danger and pulling her back at the last possible second, playing with her like a child's trinket or a badly-written story. And so fate decided that the one time Avielle would look away from the ground – chiefly, to inspect another circular platform, this one with arched walls like wayshrines encircling its width – would be the time where her foot came down on a bronze plate that just happened to be there.
She stumbled, swearing as she slipped and tried to regain her balance. Henantier's perception definitely seemed closer than it had before, but she just wanted this damn thing over with. The thought that there might even be more tests in Henantier's Playground of Dementia was wrangling with her extremely starved and vestigial optimism.
She stumbled and swore slightly more when a conveniently located cluster of boulders decided to stop floating and held a competition to see which one could land on her.
This wasn't hard enough to run away from, except that Avielle had a tendency to not pay attention while she was fleeing. And so she ended up landing on another pressure plate as she sidestepped a chunk of falling rock and jumped forward towards the path. This walkway was not curved and jagged like the others, but a straight shot forward, consisting of tall square pillars.
That were trapped, of course.
If she'd missed the second plate, she could have taken a leisurely stroll towards her goal. As it was, the second Avielle's foot touched down upon the first pillar, it shuddered and dropped at an alarmingly fast rate.
The Breton shrieked and dashed for the next one, not a second too late – the first block had crumbled into the darkness. The second pillar didn't waste any time following suit, nor the third. Her skin burned, her arms were badly scraped, and her stomach felt like it had relocated itself somewhere near her feet, As an added bonus, after the fourth, the entire complex seemed to tire of waiting, and all of the pillars started to fall.
And while everything else collapsed down into the abyss, the element of Perception shone on tranquilly, straight ahead.
Something snapped in Avielle's mind. A primal survival instinct buried beneath years of study and logic reared its head and struck. No time to think. No time to second-guess. It had all come down to this; a frantic dash to see whether life or death would prevail. The pillar she stood on was sinking rapidly, and she leapt for the next one and the next, each giving way faster under her weight. Fatigue meant nothing. Pain meant nothing. Death meant nothing. She wouldn't allow it to mean anything.
Once upon a time, Avielle had panicked and thought SweetMarai'mgoingtodie as she watched the world break into pieces around her.
Now, her heart was stronger, her resistance clear. She had learned, and death could go and do something anatomically unlikely with itself if it wanted to screw with her.
I'm not going to die just yet.
She jumped, reaching for the suspended cyan star with outstretched fingers as the world beneath her feet fell away.
Terror, gasping for breath, a pounding heart... and then blue light enveloped her.
For one moment, Avielle was overwhelmed by the complete clarity that swallowed her up. Bliss and contentment mingled with shock and realisation in a startling and incomprehensible sensation. It was like being blind for one's entire life, and then seeing the sun for the first time. Awe and wonder, and beyond that, enlightenment. One second to see and understand everything, one second to comprehend the absolutism of nothing; to see the Truth...
...and it was all gone before she had a chance to remember a modicum of it, leaving her alone to pass out. Which she did.
0o0o0
For something that never changed its pace, time certainly did have an aptitude for appearing to distort itself.
The vampire was old enough that decades could pass him by like blurs, and yet the eight hours he passed waiting in a nobleman's cobwebbed closet seemed to stretch on forever. Perhaps he was suffering from a rare lapse of boredom, or perhaps it was omnipresent thirst starting to stir again from its latent state. He hadn't fed since a quick nip in Cheydinhal to hold him over for the journey across Cyrodiil, and while he was very good at keeping his darker half subdued, it was much easier to keep down if he had something to keep himself busy with. Which he did not. Watching a household's worth of life essence flitting idly around him for the entire time hadn't helped it much.
In any case, he was grateful when the old grandfather clock in the foyer rang a tremulous four, and the servants hurried to the kitchen to prepare Astellus's final feast.
He let his Hunter's Sight fade away as he slid out of the closet like shadow given form. Glowing eyes tended to draw attention; from his experience, the radiance would actually shine under his hood. Not that he was wearing it, however. If being seen trespassing was no worse than being called out for a vampire, then he'd rather face capture with unobscured vision.
Besides, spotting everyone from rooms away took all the excitement, the... intensity out of it.
The vampire may not have been seeking out prey to fall upon with tooth and claw, but he was hunting now, and the simple spread of death by his hand was enough to satiate that innate carnal nature. He spent his days and nights signing contracts and patiently teaching his apprentices the arts of shadow. It was ironic that among assassins, he was a gentleman; alone was when he could let the beast surface in his mind.
It wasn't that he was allowing it to control him, no... He would never demean himself as to willingly allow the animal to dominate the man. He'd struggled powerfully in the beginning, they all had – the rarity of civilized vampires was a testament to the difficulty of re-mastering the self. It was just that bloodshed seemed to be as much a need as blood itself, if much more controllable, as Molag Bal's violence spilled over into his curse; when death called, his crueler nature stirred, and why repress it if repression meant that it would flare up again when it had no venues to answer its calling?
Two maids were cleaning at the base of the stairs, the exquisite throb of life beating in their necks. The beast crouched and snarled, while the master tightened his grip on its leash until it responded to his will.
Not yet.
Vicente edged along the wall, shifting his weight so that the aged floorboards underfoot would not creak. He kept his arcane aptitude in his fingers, ready to 'embrace the shadows', as one vampire had once described it. Indeed, his Embrace of Shadows did feel different than a typical invisibility enchantment; Vicente had once described the particular ability of the Dark Gift as the Night Mother's arms around him. He was quite ready to call forth that protection if regular stealth failed him. But he was as shadow itself, and not one of the girls spared him a glance.
Through the deserted dining hall, skirting around the doomed nobleman himself in his sitting room... Eventually, he found himself concealed between one of the kitchen's open doors and a corner. The little bottle of death clinked quietly in his pocket as he finally lifted his hand and let the cool sanctuary of invisibility shroud him. The warm and aromatic kitchen seemed an ironic place for the seeds of death to be planted, but in the same time, that was the sheer beauty of his craft.
Three minutes was more than enough time to deliver his cargo. A shimmy here, a step there, and the phantom had crossed the crowded room without brushing up against anyone. The smell of Morrowind brandy guided him towards a tureen of half-finished gravy; the chef turned around to sneeze, and nobody saw a bottle tip some orange liquid into the bowl before vanishing into the folds of an invisible cloak. The beast howled and the master crowed with it – that gleam of life which was forbidden to him would flee another mortal shell before the day was over.
Vicente's work was done, and much too easily, at that, given his still-lingering suspicions. He was free to go, as free as a sunny sky left him, but he was quite meticulous. Things were always capable of going wrong; there was no such thing as a perfect plan. He preferred to see his work brought to fruition, to make certain that the Night Mother's task was not left incomplete.
And for that reason, the vampire waited.