Unknown Shores
Unknown Date
Unknown Time
All through his existence, Marcus had known one thing.
Pain.
But the trauma he had kept locked deep within his memories had suddenly surfaced.
He felt the sharp blade at his backside; he felt how it slowly peeled his soft skin, and he remembered how he cried out.
I tried to move, but I could not. My hands were tied to the bedposts. The old sard kept muttering some incantation about cleansing.I had not understood a single word back then, but now I know they were cleansing for my sins, carnal sins carried from parent to offspring.
Oh, how I hated it. How I hated crying and moaning and not being able to do anything about it.
How I hated weakness.
He needed something else, something better, something that would ease the pain.
Reliyna
As Marcus' mind forayed into years and years of pain, of losses, and tortures and of things he never had, he clung to Reliyna.
As someone freezes to death, they try to conjure images of warmth, of love, perhaps as a last attempt to escape the cold, or perhaps an attempt to make the end more comfortable.
It was the same with Marcus, but the only difference was that the release from all pain never came.
People feared their ends, so they feared Death. They imagined it to be a terrible figure, armed with long sharp blades that ripped their souls from their bodies.
Marcus imagined that Death was a lady, a lady made of all the sweet rolls and the honey treats he never had as a child, a lady made of all the warmth and affection he envied, a lady that never judged him, who never called him a freak and a monster.
He imagined her to be as silver as the pale moonlight, who would lead him by hand to a soft, warm bed made just for him. And he would never wake up.
But she never came for him.
So Marcus clung to the only warmth he ever had known.
To Reliyna.
Ald'Ruhn
Council Club
Vvardenfell Imperial province,
Morrowind
19th of Sun's Height 3E 425
Reliyna Elvyna Le Verger
The heat was unbearable.
The ash was really good for my hair, my skin and my lungs and my mood.
The food was bad, and the prices were too high, and the buildings were all extremely strange.
I had come here two months ago, and I still wondered what I was doing in Vvardenfell.
I spent most of my waking hours contemplating this grave question, multitasking quite often.
At this rate, I imagined, I was sure to become a poet.
Wasn't that how it always started? First you contemplated grave questions, then you contemplated the futility of life and then you started writing sappy poetry.
I know, I had an aunt, her name was Aenor. That's what happened to her.
Her poetry was so interesting, so very entertaining and thought invoking that one of her pages she used to recite all of her poems to took her writing-quill, and stabbed it into his brain through the eye.
I think he had hoped that some of her unwritten poetry hidden inside the quill would directly be injected into all of the passages in his head.
I was fifteen at the time.
I swear by the nine that that was the reason I started scrawling dirty pictures into my verse book.
But maybe it was because I hated learning how to write poetry, I always preferred reading novels and shooting arrows in targets.
I remember that once I pinned my poetry teacher to one of the targets.
Anyway, it seems I went off on a tangent there.
Back to Vvardenfell.
I think I preferred the descriptions in the books to this dry, ashy wasteland.
And no, that was not why I came here.
So, on 19th of Sun's Height, I was contemplating the grave question while I tried to somehow gulp down the mouth burningly spicy food with an equally stomach burning pot of Shein.
My face was flushed, my eyes were red. That I was eating Nix-Hound meat served in a stew so hot that it could burn right through my favourite shirt and trousers and my skin would have been a shock to my younger self from a few years ago.
The truth was, up until 3E 422, Reliyna Edwina Le Verger never ate anything other than exquisitely prepared meat that melted in her mouth, bread as soft and as white as her skin, and wine as sweet as her voice.
She never dressed in anything but the softest and sheerest of silks, and the bed she slept in was as soft as fleece. The people that surrounded her were as ravishingly beautiful as her face.
Those were the rules.
And those rules were prepared to condition her to a life as exquisite and as soft as those material comforts she was cocooned in.
And I hated it.
And that was why I ran.
Again, off another tangent.
Too many tangents today, so now I really can't claim that I hated geometry as well.
Anyway, back to the eighteen year old girl with a pretty face flushed with red and watery eyes dressed in men's clothes sitting at a table with the spiciest food in existence next to a bow and a filled quiver.
Vvardenfell felt like an ugly box hiding another even smaller ugly box hiding another ugly box that hid nothing but...nothingness.
Everyone kept staring at you. At first it was disconcerting, but slowly it grew outright scary.
Their eyes, the Dunmer hated you, they wished with all of their might, they wished you left, and never came back.
When I felt the sets of red eyes fixated upon me I gulped.
It was then that I noticed that I was in a place where all of the patrons were exclusively Dunmer and most were nasty looking Scarfaces.
I put the stew down, chewing whatever tough meat that was in my mouth. At least it was boneless.
Then the door opened.
And in stepped the most timid Imperial that I had ever seen. In fact he was so timid that I was very sure that he was going to cry for his mother the moment he walked through the door.
Sorry, I am supposed to be serious aren't I?
Slight rectification then, he was positively the cockiest one I had ever seen.
He was tall, dressed in a black padded leather jacket, unbuttoned, and under it, a leather vest. He had tan trousers on, and a set of armoured boots that ended an inch below his knees. His left arm was concealed below the elbow in the heaviest steel gauntlet I had ever seen.
Piercing, unsettling grey eyes under dust caked eyebrows and a head full of unkempt hair, equally dust caked. He had a long nose, and a face full of week old stubble.
His mouth was slightly twisted in a cold sneer.
He wasn't very bad looking, but it seemed like talking to him, even approaching him would not actually be a very good idea.
He moved into the centre of the club, his dusty boots scrunching on the floor. He had a long steel sword strapped to his waist, and judging from the dark red splotches on the scabbard that the dirt had settled on, it had been used recently.
The friendly patrons who were boring holes into me with their eyes now started boring holes into his back, but he never paid them any sort of attention.
Instead, he walked straight to the bar, sat at a stool, unhooked the scabbard from his belt and placed his arms on the counter.
"So, innkeep, you got food right?" His voice was deep and gravelly, his pronunciation perfect, but it seemed he was putting too much effort into them, his accent was adopted, and not how he had learned to speak.
"For the last time, N'wah, my name is Darvam Hlaren, not innkeep, or barkeep, or barman."
"Well, mate, sard it, it sounds all the same to me. "
Silence.
The newcomer was getting very impatient; he kept on balling his armoured left hand into a fist and again relaxing it, as if he was in pain.
"Well, do you have some food and Sujamma?"
"So the outlander has acquired a taste for our local brews? Very well, I have some fresh cliff-racer with saltrice, or Nix stew, five drakes each, and a pot of Sujamma is five more."
"You robbing me, mate? Sujamma was three coins a week ago."
"Well what can I say, stocks are low."
The newcomer huffed, muttered something and counted out ten coins on the countertop, impatiently scratching patterns into the frayed wood.
Davram turned his back to the newcomer and started preparing his food.
Then he straightened up, and brought out a small brass pipe and a tamper.
He patted his pockets for something, and finally brought out a brass box and a set of flints. From the box, he emptied some white powdery substance into his pipe, and then pressed it with the tamper, then he filled it again, and once more, he compressed the white substance into the bowl of the pipe.
Then he struck the flints together to make fire.
He inhaled deep, closed his eyes and drew his head back, exhaling white smoke through his nose. His shoulders slumped, and his entire body relaxed, the expression on his face was one of relief.
The room was almost filled with a sharp, numbing smell.
Whatever he was smoking, it was a narcotic.
The innkeeper turned again, first with a disinterested face, but when he smelled the numbing fumes he coughed and angrily barked.
"You N'wah! Does my club look like a skooma den to you?"
"Ugh, mate, it doesn't seem like an orphanage either." He disinterestedly dropped three coins on to the countertop.
The innkeeper huffed, pocketed the coins, muttered something and got back to his work.
The newcomer kept alternating between his food and drink, and the pipe in his left hand.
His tensed shoulders had dropped, he was relaxing.
He ate at an alarming rate occasionally taking puffs out of his pipe, almost as if he had allotted only a few seconds to eat and then the food would be taken away. How he could eat the extremely hot stew and drink almost the entire pot of the strong alcohol without even flinching seemed a mystery to me.
And then it happened.
A particularly savoury group of gentlemen who really didn't look like criminals at all walked up to the counter and grabbed the newcomer by his thick neck. One of them peered at me with his beady eyes, and the look sent chills down my spine.
I picked up my bow and started strapping the quiver to my waist.
The leader of the gentlemen holding the newcomer by the neck tried to slam his head on the counter, but he had misjudged the strength of his neck, and failed to move his head even a single inch.
"Get up, and walk out of here, Outlander. This here is a decent place for decent mer, not for addict N'wahs like you."
"I paid. I'll finish my stuff"
Either they were completely deaf or extremely stupid, because they completely missed the menace in that growl.
A particularly savoury gentleman shifted his stare to my face, probably hoping that the soft fragile outlander would go as red as a beetroot and start crying under his intense gaze, and then fall over her feet in love for him.
Quite unfortunately for him, this outlander didn't really enjoy the company of most men or even women.
She found most people to be uninteresting and slow for her tastes.
The idiotic leader once again, tried to slam the newcomer's head to the countertop in vain. He probably was too stupid to live.
"Leave, N'wah, I bet that in your homeland your mother lets you, what's that word you use? Sard? Well, I bet that in your homeland, your mother lets you 'sard' her for money, but we Dunmer have some ru..."
Before he could finish the insult I saw the newcomer go purple with rage. He put both his feet to the counter he was facing, and from where he was sitting, leaped over the leader, his hand grasping the hilt of his sword.
A swing, a flash and a scream.
The newcomer was lying on the floor, with a loud crash.
The leader's decapitated head sat on the counter, blinking and gaping, as if in utter surprise, right in front of the barkeep. His body first fell to its knees, and then on the counter, emptying copious amounts of blood on its own decapitated head.
The room was filled with the revolting, pungent smell of faeces.
Davram vomited.
Apparently invoking/insulting the newcomer's mother was a sure-fire method to commit suicide by proxy.
By this time the initial surprise had passed, and the knives and blackjacks were out on display.
The pudgy thickset gentleman who had been spending his time staring at me started roaring.
"Kill the N'wahs, both of the..."
The words died in his throat as the arrow tore through his neck with ease, and in half a moment, the person next to him fell as if he had slipped, an arrow buried in his heart.
I sensed footsteps behind me.
When I turned I saw the newcomer slash his stomach open.
While he tried to retrieve his sword from the dying corpse another tried to bring a blackjack down on his head, but before he could, my arrow was in his eye.
The newcomer faced me, his face bloody, sporting a murderous grin, looking like a Daedra out of Oblivion.
He looked at me, nodded once swiftly, then turned and punched another attacker's face in.
And to think I imagined he used his gauntlet to cheat merchants' balances!
And then it was over.
Tables had been upturned, food and alcohol had mixed with blood and shite, and the walls had been painted red.
Everyone who wasn't fighting had already cleared out.
The newcomer was heaving. Probably too spent after getting in one fight after the other.
And that was when the Redoran guard kicked the door in.
And there we go.
Thanks to JM38LACK, Vanillathunder215 and Countess Z for ideas and for being a massive help to me throughout.
No thanks to my idiotic brother Vikingbardofragnarok, whose only response was: "I got homework, figure it out yourself."
Also, the original upload date for this is me and my brother's birthday. So, happy birthday asshole!
Next chapter will be here soon.