A Postlude to Destruction and Ruin
"Does anyone have any idea how this happened?" Sergeant Vingdrill demanded.
The ghastly sight before him necessitated such a reaction. The soldier to whom he spoke had gone pale in the face when leading his superior to the destroyed campsite. Supposedly attacked by a sizeable group of insurgents, not a single man was left alive in the wake of the covert onslaught.
"None, sir," the dutiful subordinate reported, an overtone of nervousness infiltrating within the words that he spoke. "They look to have been overrun, sir. It's…by Phynaster, it's a bloodbath!"
Strewn about this patch of shaded woods was what amounted to an entire detachment of soldiers. Or, rather, what remained of them. The men had been left where they had fallen, their lifeblood having mingled and pooled onto the cold, brown soil upon which their camp had stood. Most of them were mutilated to some degree- some dismembered, others disemboweled, and more still decapitated. Some sick deviant had even taken to desecrating several of the corpses, deciding to lop off the limbs and neck of several random troops amongst the ranks of the dead, leaving only a blood-spattered torso.
Particularly gruesome was the fate that had befallen the commanding officer. The wizened Altmer had been eviscerated by a substantially large blade, and nailed to a nearby tree. His corpse had been exposed to the elements for a sizeable amount of time, though the permeating cold had done nothing to preserve the body; postmortem ruptures had begun to form upon the almost ghostly-pale skin of the fellow Mer. Carrion birds had also made off with much of the flesh upon the cadaver's face, with two glaring, bloodied sockets replacing what had been his eyes. Though the appalling stench emanating from this corpse was present throughout the entirety of the camp in the form of similarly decomposed bodies, the vicinity closest to the tree that he was nailed upon almost seemed to be corrupted with a far more noxious and grotesque odor. At least several men had retched upon first approaching the tree, or so Vingdrill had been told.
Though nature had apparently tried its best to reclaim the vestiges of this deceased victim, one very obvious sign still remained. Upon the commanding officer's chest was an image, viciously carved into his very flesh. The lack of any large spatter of blood upon the torso (which Vingdrill attributed to the marking having been made after the man's death, when such large surges of blood would simply be restrained to stagnant streams of the sanguine fluid) allowed for the glaring red streaks to be seen clearly. They were, as Vingdrill noticed, in the shape of an enclosed fist.
That revelation only made Vingdrill's heart sink. Those soldiers of the Aldmeri Dominion who still remained in Skyrim had recently been forced to contend with a new, unprecedented threat. Attacks such as this were abhorrently common; hit-and-run strikes upon clandestine Thalmor fortifications, all made by some obstinate group of insurgents that had yet to reveal themselves, save only for their assaults that had yet to yield a single survivor.
For whatever reason, their presence had only been made known after a rather grievous onslaught originating from Northwatch Keep, taking place three months after the Stormcloak Rebellion had been supposedly purged. The details of its occurrence had been concealed, but the attack had all but completely diminished the Thalmor presence to the northwest. It took a great deal of resources and time, but the keep's forces had been replaced in a feverish fashion, so as to not provoke a response from the Imperials; such suspicious military action such as that was best saved for the next war with the Empire, as he had overheard Lillandril say afterwards.
Lillandril, of course, was not at all worried by this most recent attack. When word had come of its happening, Vingdrill's superior had ordered him to deal with it. While the sergeant respected his fire-forged companion, he was also well aware that Lillandril only assigned him to otherwise menial and simple tasks, or ones that he simply could not possibly care less about. When Lillandril told him that he would visiting with a former contact, he had also told Vingdrill to merely "see what's going on, jot down a note or two, and leave as quickly as possible…preferably before another Justiciar arrives on the scene and asks where in the name of Oblivion I am."
As far as he was concerned, he had fulfilled that order to the letter. Except, of course, for the departure. It was time, Vingdrill decided, for him to report back. No new information could be learned from reexamining the ruined campsite, and few of the soldiers poking through the debris seemed eager to inform their superior of any other oddities or matters of a macabre nature.
Thus, the Altmer silently retreated back up the hill overlooking the camp. While he should have at least mourned his fallen comrades, he vaguely recalled having at least met the commanding officer on at least one occasion. He was, to hear the rumors abound about him, an upstart, born from the plebs of some backwater village in Alinor. Horrifying to the higher echelons, the particular village was further inland; that was to say that it held only inferiorly-bred specimens, treacherous exiles, and Altmer too unbefitting and ignoble to be called such.
This, Vingdrill decided, was likely why they had been so terribly butchered. Putting baseborn, uneducated rejects of the "common people" in a position of command could only lead to disaster, as this now proved. It was practically elementary that tucking a largely indefensible camp within a valley was suicidal. If nothing else, this was probably the reason for the failed defensive and massacre of the camp's men; they had likely been surrounded and attacked from on high, whilst attempting to futilely fight an enemy that was otherwise unreachable. Had Lillandril gotten to the officer first, the bastard would have been flogged for his incompetence. Now, however, utter apathy towards his death was the next best thing, as it would now seem.
With but a report, Vingdrill knew, Lillandril would inform Ondolemar of any outstanding evidence requiring further investigation, whilst leaving out anything that proved too immaterial to be published in an account as vital as this. Knowing Lillandril, the entirety of this entire incident would be concealed, and the dissidents dealt with before they can so much as publicize themselves and make their struggle known to the world.
As far as anyone was concerned, this event had never taken place, and those whom had died were to go unremembered. To the annals of history, theirs was lower than ignominy, for theirs was to be overlooked; to be forgotten and disremembered was the recompense for their duty, Vingdrill bitterly thought. He shook this thought out of his head, however. They had been given the honor of enlisting in the service of the true descendants of the Aldmeri race, and they had died so that others might accomplish that which they themselves could not- permanent establishment of Elven superiority, and an unofficial revival of the glory days of the time before Man, when Mer cohabited the land, free from such lesser and savage beings. They should have been proud, he finally resolved, to have contributed to that most divine and just goal.
As Sergeant Vingdrill clambered atop his mount, a peculiar sight caught his eye. It was, to the unperceptive, but a lone tree. It was not the tree itself, however, that had stirred such curiosity in the Altmer. Rather, it was what he saw adorning it.
A piece of parchment was posted on the side of the tree, its writing unintelligible at the distance that Vingdrill found himself at. Rousing his horse to motion, he squinted to make out the collection of words upon the paper. It was, as he noted, written in a rather brutish hand, the penmanship implying the lack of literacy and refinement on the writer's part. Thankfully, the oaf had the sense to at least write in large letters, and to leave behind a telltale inscription of an all-too-familiar symbol. Vingdrill was wrought with dismay and a sense of stifling trepidation as he read the contents of the missive.
The Stone-Fists send their regards, it read. And at the corner of the parchment, the furtive writer had left an iconic motif: an upraised fist that seemed to beat upon the very foundations of order, its very image resplendent with the savagery of the man to whom it was connected to. A man long thought dead… and now once again a wanted rebel.
In a moment of pure shock, Vingdrill mouthed the man's name to himself, fear now coursing through him. As he glanced back down upon the campsite, he was now revolted by the sight, and quickly averted his eyes. Unable to stay any longer, the sergeant rode off into the distance, towards Lillandril's campsite. The commander would not be there, he knew, but his steward would be.
Now resolute in his intentions, Vingdrill pushed his horse further and faster than he would normally dare, and raced back towards the outskirts of Morthal. Time was of the essence, he knew. That axe-dragging Nord had returned from the dead to haunt the Aldmeri Dominion once again. Galmar Stone-Fist had returned.