The chill of the morning mist absorbed the first rays of the sun, pulling them into infinite particles of glitter and diffusing them amongst the mist. The Hag Rock watched it silently, allowing the wandering water to circle and sniff around her flanks like the wily old predator it was to her.

She said nothing as the miniscule itching footfalls of the mortals who made their nests within her began to stir, reasoning that they would be all be buried and dead in no more than a moment so there was no use in taking note of them.

She did not even perceive the light footsteps of elves, daintily heel-toeing about their morning business as the brutish Forsworn raiding parties trickled like blood down into the valley below.

"You carry yourself with such a serious mien sometimes, Lydia! Whatever do you think about all day that causes that frown?"

Lily beamed jovially, and Lydia recalled that the Thane often said things that would get your jaw broken in a tavern as a means of cheering people up, and quickly quashed the disappointment she felt at herself for feeling somewhat cheered up by it.

"I don't think about anything, Miss Lily."

Having mentally congratulated herself for getting through her opening sentence, she unfortunately lost track of the next one as Miss Tilly sauntered over to join them.

She was wearing more traditional travelling clothes, but to Lydia's horror she found that even when seeing her fully dressed, her traitorous brain had the gall to remember what she looked like in pelts and warpaint…

"Morning ladies! Up with the lark, eh? Best way to be, I say."

She spoke with the unnatural chipperness that people of the upper classes deployed when confronted with the most staggering examples of intergenerational poverty the world could present, and yet no-one in the camp appeared to feel patronised by her wide-eyed enthusiasm at their tanning racks and meagre rations.

"Now, I've asked dear old Luteg to help me carry some of my things down to the road, but after that could I trouble you to assist me with some of the more irksome pieces, Ser Lydia?"

It took Lydia entirely too long to realise she was the one being petitioned, and mumbled in the affirmative more as a sort of hind-brain response to an authoritative tone than any desire to help, but if Tilly minded that at all she gave no outward sign.

Instead she thanked her cheerily and wandered over to a particularly lichen encrusted boulder and cleared her throat loudly with her hands on her hips.

That the boulder seemed momentarily to shuffle angrily at her seemed to surprise nobody but the Housecarl, who seemed to be temporarily resistant to the Elsinores' reality-shifting aura.

"Come along darling! Hand off rock and on with sock, eh?"

The boulder rolled over revealing that it was no more than possibly the world's foulest blanket, unearthing perhaps the largest and most terrifying man Lydia had ever seen in her life.

Phrases like 'a bear of a man' seemed custom-tooled for moments like this and simultaneously not adequate to describe the 7-foot mass of muscle, shaggy hair and gore-soaked pelts who was scratching himself with such vigour that it sounded like someone dragging a sword through gravel. Perhaps it was more fair to say that he was a real man of a bear.

"Don't got socks, Missus…" He said plaintively, looking directly ahead at nothing at all. He did drop the rock he had been cradling in his sleep however, possibly just because someone had told him to with the right vocal inflection.

Once again Tilly paid no attention to the tone or content of his reply, merely allowing the universe to remould itself in her wake as she chivvied various unaffiliated Forsworn denizens into corralling her supplies into a handful of travel sacks.

Indeed, they might well have ended up with half the camp assembling a full carriage and horses merely by the force of aristocratic bureaucracy were it not for the sounding of a low horn coming from the very top of the Hag Rock.

Anyone who felt a desire to be doing anything helpful stopped dead, each member of the camp staring in unison at the peak. The ancient stone doors of the lower temple pushed themselves open, and a man stepped out into the light.

Lydia looked closely at him, as ragged and filthy as all the other camp members but somehow very much apart from them. Each member of the camp looked to him with what in their way was reverence. Even Tilly allowed herself to fall silent as the man walked solemnly towards her, the horns on his head seeming oddly menacing despite their crudeness.

Lydia stepped closer, close enough that if needed she could draw iron and cover Tilly (reasoning that her Thane would likely give the order herself and simply saving herself some time) but the man paid her no mind.

Tilly radiated her usual confidence, but Lydia noticed the hand at her side with the palm outstretched, a non-verbal sign.

Don't move.

"Your presence honours me, noble Cher-nunnos. The house of Elsinore affir-"

"You are leaving the Rock."

He gave a statement, there was no question.

"You see true, Hag-Honed. We will be leaving shortly."

As Lydia watched the eerie being in front of her, she tried to figure out exactly what felt so wrong about him. There was a wound on his chest, yes… lots of people have wounds though. There was a vegetative mass pressed angrily into the flesh, dark and dried with pus.

That wasn't it… there was something off about him.

"This is good."

He left the sentence hanging in the air, and as he did Lydia realised what was wrong.

He wasn't blinking.

He wasn't breathing.

He didn't twitch, sway or flex in any way. He was completely silent, unflappable.

Dead.

…and yet not?

"You will not return. If you are seen from this day forward, you are Dram-gul. You are to be slain and your bodies burned."

Tilly merely smiled.

"It is as you say, Briarheart."

The corpse nodded, yet did not move.

Lily, Tilly and Lydia packed up the last of their things in silence, pencilling out the larger bags to the placid Luteg. As they walked down the path towards the river, the antlered man's eyes never left them.

It was not until he had disappeared entirely that the unusually irrepressible Elsinore friendliness felt comfortable enough to reassert itself.

"Well he was a spooky sort, wasn't he?" Lily said it as if she were referring to a particularly gaudy painting rather than a blood-soaked Revenant.

"Oh yes, old Chernunnos was half the reason I've been here as long as I have. Absolutely fascinating application of magic, to the point where beyond the obvious it's hard to even detect it as magic." Tilly spoke very matter-of-factly, revealing once again that the two sisters were scholars first and foremost.

Lydia's brow creased, she was vaguely uncomfortable with discussing the corpse-man next to his colleague, even if said colleague seemed unconcerned with the whole affair.

"Mister Chernunnos is nice, really missus, 'e jus' looks after us is all. 'E got to be uh, got to be careful about who 'e let's up on der Rock." Luteg's words were surprisingly soft considering he sounded like he had been chewing them for a while.

Tilly was worked up into a lather now anyway, so Luteg served as academic punctuation rather than a conversational partner.

"The Briarheart ritual is just an absolutely fascinating practice, it doesn't really have an equivalent in any other Tamrielic cultures! The 'Hags' of the Reach extract the living heart out of a Forsworn warrior, replacing it with an alchemically treated Briar seed. Briarhearts can fight well beyond the tolerances of a normal living human, and wield spells that would otherwise be recognisable applications of the School of Destruction completely on instinct."

Lily perked up considerably at this, never turning down an opportunity to pick up some new magical knowledge.

"I mean… that's a combination of a dozen or more focused self-fueling enchantments fused to a single focal point! Even keeping a human alive without a heart… I naturally haven't studied necromancy at anything more than a theoretical level, but that degree of reanimation is far beyond nearly any necromancer I've ever heard of! Even Potema of Solitude chose to use Vampires instead of animating undead generals to lead her forces…"

Luteg sniffed loudly, and Lily belatedly seemed to notice he was there.

"Mister Chernunnos ain't a ghost or nuffink… 'e's alive. I know 'cos he's always 'urtin, 'specially when 'e finks nobody can see 'im. 'Urts 'im all day and all night it does, right terrible…"

The Elsinore sisters had the good grace to look a little bit chastened by Luteg's earnestness, even if it didn't totally dissuade them from continuing the discussion.

"Yes… well my own notes would corroborate that. He… well, as far as I can tell his whole circulatory system is entirely non-functional now. He still draws in breath on occasion, but only to speak. As far as I can tell, his entire body is being run magically now."

Tilly made an effort to mask her scientific enthusiasm and mostly succeeded.

"The thing of it is though, I don't think his body is aware of that. I think his pain comes from the fact that he is in effect constantly drowning, every second of the day. His body is crying out for air and he can't take it in. Between that, the numbness from lack of blood flow and the no doubt myriad of digestive and phlegmatic issues… I'd say that it must be utter agony to be a Briarheart."

Nobody quite had the false positivity necessary to respond to that with good-spirited curiosity, so they all walked in silence for a while, letting gravity guide them to the bank of the Karth. Indeed, they hardly seemed to notice the burbling of the water until Luteg came to a lumbering stop and placed Tilly's bags on the ground with surprising gentleness.

"Got to go back now Missus… When are you comin' around again?"

Tilly gave the giant a sad look, and placed a delicate hand on his shoulder.

"I'm afraid that I'm not allowed back, Luteg… not for a long time, at least."

Even Lydia could see the very moment Luteg's own heart broke in two, as his brow dropped and he appeared to take a moment to… chew this thought, his lips and jaw seeming unsettled by this idea.

"Mister Chernunnos don't mean it too much, missus… I could talk in 'is ear if you like? I bet he'd let you back if I did…"

Tilly stroked the gargantuan arm comfortingly, as if trying to console a cliff face.

"I'm afraid not, Luteg. My time here in Skyrim will be coming to an end soon, and I'll need to go home… I wouldn't be able to make another trip to the rock even if I was allowed to…"

Luteg wasn't concerned about the fact that his eyes were leaking, he sniffed wetly and wiped his face with one massive forearm.

"But… I like you comin' up to the rock, Missus…"

Lily made a small noise of sympathy but didn't intervene any further, Tilly dug into one of her bags for something and returned with a couple of fairly small books tied together with a swatch of leather.

"Well, then you'll just have to learn the rest of your letters like we've been practising and then you'll be able to talk to me wherever in the world I am, won't you?"

She handed the books to Luteg, and though they seemed so unusual in the hands of the barbarian he treated them as delicately as you might hold the Emperor's Crown.

"Do my best, Missus… Promise I will. I don't really understand 'em very well yet, but I'll learn all my letters and I'll talk to you like that…"

Though riven with sadness, Luteg's body began guiding itself back up the slope. Lydia was once told that there were beasts in the world so large that they needed brains in their feet because the distance between their head and the ground was too large to manage.

She was reminded of this fact as Luteg's feet seemed to act of their own volition, pulling the quietly weeping behemoth up into the fog.