It was my first ever attempt at blackmail, and I felt terrible, taking advantage of the old Khajiit's guilty secret and fear of being discovered. I had bumped into him by sheer accident - so many things have been happening to me by sheer accident ever since I was small that I am beginning to wonder whether they really are accidental - while I was stumbling along some dimly lit corridor, in the dead of night, woken yet again by the haunting vision of my mother and seeking out my father or Ondolemar, longing for the reserved, almost reluctant comfort they would give me at times like this. I can still picture the Khajiit's face as he staggered to his feet from his crouching pose by a tall, bulky wardrobe, which had had been busily emptying when I tripped over his tail; I can still see him stuffing his lockpicks back into his pocket with trembling hands - ears pressed back, eyes widened with blank terror, mouth sagging in a most piteous way.

'Please, young master!' he had breathed chokingly, grabbing me above the elbow, the desperate strength of his grip making me wince and blink off tears, 'Dro'Bakhar only takes small things, tiny things, things that will not be missed! Dro'Bakhar is in debt, and if he doesn't steal, people will come for him - bad, bad people! Please, please, don't tell anyone you saw Dro'Bakhar - especially your most esteemed father!'

At the time I had just nodded in silent impatience, wriggled out of the Khajiit's grasp and hurried off back to my room, my only wish being to forget the whole thing as soon as possible. It had never occurred to me that I could use this suddenly acquired knowledge for my own personal gain - and yet now I found myself doing just that.

'Dro'Bakhar...' I began sheepishly, hovering behind his back while he was doing some chore or other, 'Could you... That is... If you don't mind... I'd like to...' I glanced around to check that we were alone and lowered my voice dramatically, 'I'd like to borrow one of your lockpicks... Or I... Or I will tell everything to Father!'

That last part, which I blurted out as fast as I could, my throat contracting with physical repulsion, sounded forced and unnatural, but I suppose Dro'Bakhar was too frightened to notice how I really felt. With a small, nervous laugh, he fumbled about in the folds of his baggy garments and thrust something thin and hard into my hand, 'There. Anything for Dro'Bakhar's little friend!'

His expression stirred deep within me a wild urge to throw my arms around him and tell him I was sorry, so very, very sorry... But I restrained myself and made do with a feeble, inadequate 'Thank you'.

I have never been the one for stealth, bursting clumsily even into those places that should be entered discreetly; I like to excuse myself with the thought that that one night must have lasted me a lifetime.

Hands clammy with cold sweat, throat parched, limbs growing numb at every sudden noise, I moved slowly, pressing myself against the wall and trembling all over, for I was sure that the throbbing in my ears and the sound of my heart, which was pounding where it shouldn't be, somewhere between my collar bones, were quite enough to wake up the whole Embassy. As I recollect, it was more than once that I had to freeze in an awkward posture, holding my breath till my eyes started streaming with silent, burning tears, in order to remain unnoticed by patrolling guards.

The passageways I crawled along in an attempt to retrace my steps on the previous day, when I had met Baldr, were so dark that it hurt me to look around, and I didn't dare use the little magic I knew to light my way, so when I reached the place that seemed vaguely familiar to my aching eyes - on my way back from Baldr's cell I had tried to take note of anything that could pass as a landmark - I had to grope around for the door, praying to all the gods I had been taught to worship that it would turn out to be one I needed.

When the fingers of my uncontrollably shaking left hand finally closed in round the door handle, I took out the lockpick with my right hand, inserted it in the keyhole and began to slowly, falteringly rotate this thin, frail little bit of metal, each of its soft clicks echoing tenfold in my mind.

The pick broke the very second the lock slid open. My heart sank; if this was not the right room, then any chance to smuggle food to Baldr was lost forever, for I would never bring myself to ask Dro'Bakhar for another lockpick. Screwing up my eyes in terror as the door creaked at my feeble push, I tiptoed inside and after an eternity of listening to silence, forced myself to tear my eyelids open.

The room was illuminated by a faintly shimmering beam of moonlight coming through the tiny window; its soft silverness made the shadowy corners all the more dark and menacing, like gaping mouths of some unknown, ravenous creatures. I could barely discern the outline of a desk and the cage bars - but the cage itself seemed empty. Had I chosen the wrong door after all? This suspicion paralyzed me; glued to the floor, unable to stir further into the room to investigate, I gave in to a fit of desperate, choked sobbing.

'Psst!' came a hissing whisper from the pitch blackness ahead of me, 'Stop your wailing! They will hear you!'

It was Baldr's voice, without a doubt; dazed by overwhelming relief, I stumbled forward, arms outstretched, and dropped down to my knees in front of the cage. Baldr edged closer to me, emerging suddenly from beyond the veil of darkness that had been concealing him, and poked his bony arm between the bars, finding my fingers and pressing them as a greeting.

'Don't be such a milk drinker,' he whispered sternly.

I gave a small, guilty sniff and handed him the tightly wrapped bundle I had been concealing beneath my night clothes.

'Here. For you,' I said simply.

With a silent but strenuous joint effort, me pushing and Baldr pulling, we managed to squeeze the precious package through the bars. He fumbled a little with all my protective knots and, peeling off layer after layer of cloth, peered at the contents as they slowly emerged, dark and shapeless against the cold glow of the moon.

It wasn't much, as I hadn't dared to carry off more - and besides, I had read somewhere that you shouldn't give half-starved people a lot of food at once - but it turned out to be more than enough for Baldr. His voice, raised to a tone far higher than his previous cautious whisper, rang with the crystal-clear laughter of joy when he thanked me, again and again, for my humble half a loaf of bread with raisins and a couple of boiled cream treats. But what fascinated him most was a handful of chocolate candy that lay at the very bottom of the bundle - this, as he said to me breathlessly, amazed, wondering, turning each dainty over in his hands to take a good look at it by the light of the moon beam, was something that he was tasting for the first time in his life. When Baldr finished munching and swallowing and making various muffled noises of approval, I pressed the palms of my hands against the hard, cold floor, preparing to lift myself from my knees.

'Are you leaving already?' he asked, startled.

'Yeah... I have nightmares, see... So my father and brother sometimes come over from their quarters and check on me. Only sometimes, but you never know. They might turn up now, when I am not in bed. You know how these things work'.

Quite naturally, my wordy, apologetic explanation gave Baldr's curiosity a fair bit of a tickle.

'What nightmares?' he asked, his voice once again hardly louder than the rustle of fallen leaves.

And before I knew it, I found myself telling him everything about my mother's pallid, bloated face and waving hair, and about how she had driven herself to such an end, and about my childhood worries in general, things like trying but failing to accept what my father taught me, and missing the bygone days when the vain, self-satisfied young Justiciar-in-training was my adored big brother... My speech was long and artless and probably barely coherent - but Baldr listened attentively, and when my faltering confession finally trailed of into the night stillness, he said a few words of comfort, which might seem frightfully silly to an adult but were - and still are - very precious to me, like a priceless treasure that has to be stored away in the deepest, farthest troves of the memory and taken out with great caution, only on rare occasions, to be marvelled at and then placed back into mothballs.

When, at long last, I crept back into my bed, it was almost dawn. As I found out later, neither my father nor Ondolemar had been to my room that night, and for once I was thankful that they were not overly caring.

The thought that I now had a friend made me so excited that I could not even doze off during those few brief hours there were left before the cogs and wheels of the Embassy would come into motion and a new day would begin; so I decided to venture into another expedition.

I had thoughtfully recovered the two halves of my broken lockpick and pieced them together with a bit of string, and since merely trying my luck with this pathetic little contraption would be pointless, I thought that perhaps there could be a potion that would increase my chance to pry the lock open. To this task I now dedicated myself, relentlessly monopolizing the very first alchemy lab I had come across, buried beneath a mound of scrolls and books and oddly-smelling ingredients. While I was conducting experiment after experiment, my hair standing on end and my face covered with soot from the little explosions that followed every time I failed to create a potion, I chanced to concoct a draft that seemed to increase my strength; I reproduced the formula several times because I figured it might be of some use to Baldr. The more ingredients I ground away into dust, chasing away the nagging thought that the grown-ups would probably roast me alive for wasting so many rare and valuable reagents, the less focused I became on the goal I had set for myself; the fortify lockpicking potion had slipped to some remote place into the back of my mind, and I became absorbed in the process itself, for what greater fun can an eleven-year-old have than mixing different things together just to see what happens? My ecstatic brewing was interrupted - just as I was about to test the slimy-looking substance which I believed to be a newly discovered invisibility potion - by none other than Ondolemar, who brushed passed me, muttering angrily to himself, hands thrust behind his back and the hood of his brand new robe pulled down so that only the tip of his nose was visible. I immediately abandoned my, for want of a better word, research (cleaning up after yourself can't possibly be a strong point if you grow up surrounded by people who do it for you) and trotted after my brother, trying to get ahead of him and peer into his face.

'Stop following me,' he grunted irritably, broadening his pace.

'I was just wondering what's up with you,' I pouted, still pressing persistently at his heels.

'What's up with me?' he cried out, as he came to an abrupt halt and wheeled round, almost knocking me off my feet, 'I will tell you what's up with me! I ask for a task to perform, any task to prove my devotion to the cause, and what do they do? Assign me to guard some little human wretch, a boy of twelve - of twelve! - whom we keep here with the sole purpose of intimidating his father! Apparently, the soldier who used to watch over the whelp before is needed on a more serious mission! Well, how about me being needed on a more serious mission? I am a Justiciar's son, for gods' sake!'

My heart did a somersault.

'I could guard the kid for you,' I suggested as timidly as I could, taking enormous breaths of air to keep my voice from trembling, 'I mean, this is really simple, isn't it? Even I could do it... I think'.

He glanced at me with suspicion, narrowed eyes glinting beneath his hood, 'Why are you so helpful all of a sudden?'

I mumbled something vaguely friendly, but Ondolemar didn't care to listen.

'I have been given a responsibility...' he mused, biting his lower lip, 'It wouldn't do to just let you do my job... But it is so humiliating, playing watchdog to a human - less than a human, a human child!' he fell silent for a short while and then exclaimed with irritable resignation, 'Oh, all right! I will take you to the kid and then try to eel into a patrol or something... Best not mention it to Father, though'.

I nodded in silent agreement till my neck began to ache.

'There,' Ondolemar said as he pushed me into the fateful room where Baldr was being kept prisoner, 'I will lock you in and take the keys with me, just in case. Don't mess anything up, or Father will have my head. Both our heads... I wonder,' he went on, lingering on the threshold, 'if you have any idea how ridiculous you look... A tiny Thalmor guarding a tiny Nord...'

'I am not a Thalmor,' I snapped, regretting my words the moment I uttered them - there was too much anger and resentment boiling in them to pass unnoticed... But my brother had already withdrawn into the corridor, the door clicking shut behind him.

Baldr, who had been watching us in silence, crouching on the cage floor, alert and tense like a beast that senses a hunter, sprung up, clutched the bars in agitation and asked, his voice loud and eager, 'How did you do it?'

'Oh, I have my ways,' I grinned with an air of greatest importance, pulling out another bulky bundle, this time containing mainly my homebrew fortify strength potions.

Baldr gulped down the rather suspicious contents of the bottles I had passed to him with touching obedience, wiping his lips with the back of his hand - a gesture he had probably copied from one of his elders as they treated themselves to good, strong drink in the mead hall. I am not sure that my concoctions were of any practical use to Baldr, but at least he didn't seem to have sprouted horns or an extra arm. Having switched from the potions to a new batch of food, he put forward a rather unexpected suggestion, his mouth full and his eyes laughing, 'Let's play a game'.

'What kind of game?' I asked, with a small frown; our present surroundings did not offer much scoped for tag or hide-and-seek.

'A... story game!' Baldr said, swallowing, his tone like that of a herald or an announcer.

I gave him a blank look.

'Oh, it's a great game!' he assured me eagerly, 'We invented it back in my village. There was a boy, see, who was really sick, and he couldn't get out of his bed - so we came over to his place and sat around him and played the story game... It's lots of fun, like when a bard is telling a story, only you have to invent the heroes and their adventures all by yourself... Let me show you how it's done,' he added, apparently noticing that my look still remained as blank as ever.

I tried as best I could to show that I was all ears. Baldr cleared his throat and began in a slow, dramatic voice, 'Once upon a time there was a Nord warrior called Soren... Tall and strong he was, with long fair hair tied in braids and a scar across his chin; he was clad from head to foot in steel armour, and wielded a battle axe... This is going to be my hero,' he explained, changing the pace of his speech back to normal, 'And he went on a journey in search of fame and adventure, with his faithful companion... Now you make up your hero'.

I scratched my head, not quite up to the task Baldr had set me. The only grown-up warriors I had had relatively close contact with were Thalmor soldiers and wizards, and I couldn't picture one of them travelling side by side with a Nord. At length, I settled on my hero being a Nord too, with strawberry blonde hair, like my own, and a few scars here and there, wearing hide armour, because that was usually the case with the few Nords I had come across, and fighting with an orcish greatsword, because I had once seen one and thought it was pretty goddamn awesome. When it came to inventing a name for him, however, I was at a total loss. I just could not think of any even remotely Nordish-sounding name, and after a few minutes of intense mental activity I finally voiced a faint plea, 'Uh, can my hero be called Baldr... Like you? That's the only Nord name I know...'

My friend granted me his permission and then said, rubbing his hands together, 'And so the heroes began their quest in the plains of Whiterun hold... Have you ever been to Whiterun hold?'

'Well, yeah... And no...' I mumbled sheepishly, 'That is, I travelled across Skyrim, but that was in a carriage, so I didn't get to see much'.

'Well then, close your eyes, and imagine this...'

So began the epic journey of two brave Nords, the tale of which my friend and I spun together, taking turns to describe our heroes' feats in battles with all creatures imaginable. In a matter of a week or so - for Ondolemar, through a bit of cheating, had managed to secure himself a position in a patrol and every day I had to guard Baldr while he was out in the wilderness - our make-believe adventurers had traversed the whole of Skyrim, climbing mountains, pushing through snow drifts with the icy wind slashing mercilessly at their faces, crossing rapid streams and treacherously still moors, trekking through dense pine forests, delving deep into ruins and crypts, and righting all wrongs they came across. It was an exciting journey, with unknown dangers lurking behind every corner and roads packed full with villagers waiting to be saved from a giant or a flock of feral hagravens. We were just planning to move our imaginary quest beyond the borders of Skyrim when it ended, terribly, tragically, and so did the stage of my life when I was called Aurelion.