Dro'zahn had quite the pep in his step as he entered the dank cavern overlooking the White River, swinging a sack of apples to and fro, munching on one as he maneuvered the dim cave.

"Eh? Who's there? Rodulf, that you?" a man called out as Dro'zahn approached.

"Nope, just me, you crazy old man." Dro'zahn took another bite from his apple–his favorite treat aside from sweet rolls–and tossed the sack down at the man's feet.

"I swear, I never thought I'd see the day when Boss would take a Khajiit under his wing." The man reached clumsily for the fruit without turning his head. "Ah, much obliged, cat," he addressed to the wall.

"No problem," Dro'zahn said. As the man dug into his snack, the Khajiit swiped the book out from under his nose. Every page was blank. "You really are blind as a bat," Dro'zahn muttered.

"What was that?" The man said, mid-bite.

"I did not say anything."

"Mhmm," he mused, completely unconvinced. "I might not see, but I sure as hell can hear, cat."

"Yeah, yeah," Dro'zahn said, waving him off. He went up, up, up the stone ramps, past the cage cantilevered over the edge of the landing (the bones within long since dried) and into the main room, Dro'zahn's newest hideout. Apparently, it had been a bandit leader's room, the very bandit leader that Dro'zahn had taken care of some weeks ago. It was easy, really: his lackeys had already begun staging a mutiny, and having a blind man guarding the front entrance made for quick work. He had to admit though, the bandits had good taste-the view of the river from the perch up top was his favorite. 'Twas a pity that he'd have to leave soon.

Dro'zahn's room was cluttered with bags of stolen goods, trophies pilfered from his many exploits around Whiterun that he hadn't yet sold. A small lantern cast flickering shadows on the walls as he fell into a wooden chair, propping his feet up on the table. He unfastened the time-worn leather satchel from his shoulder and dumped out its contents. Numerous coins, a couple jeweled trinkets, one small pouch, and various other ornate objects spilled across the table. A good day's work, but he'd had better. He quickly began sorting and sifting through his loot, appraising each purloined item with a keen, experienced eye.

He held up a jagged sapphire to the light and grinned. His day job was traveling mercenary work, mainly following the caravans, but this was his real talent.

Amidst the pile lay a delicate golden locket, its simple yet elegant design dulled under years of tarnish. Dro'zahn hesitated as he reached for it. Turning it over in his hand, a vague, almost forgotten feeling stirred deep within him. He brushed away a layer of dirt, revealing the locket's engraving: Le Roi.

With a subtle click, the locket opened, revealing two small, faded portraits: one of a man and woman, probably husband and wife, and the other of two girls, one considerably older than the other. Sisters perhaps? No doubt the couple's daughters. The youngest girl caught the Khajiit's eye, her features gentle and familiar. Dro'zahn's breath hitched. Memories of his childhood, of a friend long lost to time and circumstance, came surging to the surface.

"Bretagne..." he whispered, the name like a ghost from the past. He remembered her smile, her laugh, and the locket she always wore. She was the first one to ever give him the time of day, to treat him the same as anyone else. What were the chances of this thing ending up in his hands, among the spoils of a life he had been forced to live? How could this happen?

Dro'zahn stared at the portrait, wistful nostalgia clouding his thoughts. She'd be older now, maybe early twenties-a bit younger than him. If he recalled correctly, the little Breton next door had moved away when Dro'zahn was about six or seven years old. Just before the orphanage took him in. But that was such a long time ago...

The world of thievery and deception he had embraced suddenly felt hollow and desolate. A pang of guilt wracked him from his fond remembrance. I cannot keep this, he vowed silently to himself. He tucked the locket away safely in his pocket, and he knew what he had to do. Perhaps by returning this small treasure, he might find a sliver of redemption—a chance to right at least one wrong in a lifetime of lies and deceit. The Khajiit's resolve hardened. Tomorrow, Dro'zahn would return the locket to its rightful owner, his long-lost friend, and rectify a mistake that should never have been made.

.

.

.

Apparently, no one thought it pertinent to inform Bretagne that she now had to balance the books not only for the Companions, but also the entire guard of Whiterun, too. And after a cursory once-over, there was something off about the city's records that Bretagne just couldn't put her finger on. And if that weren't enough, her precious locket, the one with the portraits of her and her sister and their parents, was missing and she couldn't find it anywhere. But that would have to wait; she couldn't have anything distracting her right now.

The days trudged on and at the end of that week, Torvar, Athis, and Ria (or the Rascals Three, as Skjor called them) invited Bretagne out for a night of drinking at the Bannered Mare, to which she reluctantly agreed. Despite being around them almost constantly, she hadn't spent much time simply socializing with the whelps. It might be good to get out for a while, she thought, and these ledgers are going to drive me mad.

That Fredas evening, the Rascals Three led Bretagne to their usual table at the Mare, the one on the right, just inside the door. Athis, the most gentlemanly of the group (which was saying something), went to the counter to order a round while Torvar and Ria chatted. Bretagne sat stiffly, fidgeting in her seat while she looked out at the tavern-goers. She felt completely out of place. People do this for fun? she wondered.

Athis returned, two mugs in each hand, and passed them around. Torvar raised his in the air. "To takin' the night off!"

A light chorus of cheers sounded, and Bretagne sipped from her drink. She immediately regretted it. "Ugh, what is this?" she asked, grimacing.

"Old Gold 200," Athis explained. "What, this 'common mead' not good enough for your sophisticated palate?" he mocked good-naturedly.

Bretagne cleared her throat. "No, it's... it's fine." She forced a smile and gulped down more, fighting a shudder at the taste. Whatever Farkas kept serving her was far superior to this swill.

"No pay, no say," Torvar recited.

Bretagne nodded. "Ahem. I apologize. I don't mean to sound ungrateful–really, I am. Thank you all for bringing me out tonight." She looked down sheepishly. "I must confess, though. I've never actually been out drinking like this before."

"Surely you're jesting… right?" Ria asked.

"You never been out drinkin' before?" Torvar whistled to the innkeeper. "Hey Hulda! We got a tavern virgin over here!" He chuckled. "Ha, get it? Like a tavern wench, but not?" Ria rolled her eyes, and Athis ignored him, but he didn't care. "Gimme your best drink, Hulda! The strong stuff!"

"Make it a Cliff Racer," Athis added cheekily.

"Oh no," Ria breathed, and turned to Bretagne. "I wouldn't drink that, if I were you."

Bretagne frowned. "Why? What's a Cliff Racer?"

A few moments later, a pretty young Redguard woman came by with a tall ornate glass. "Here you are."

Bretagne looked uncertainly at the glass, peering at the liquid within. "What's in it?"

"Firebrand wine, Cyrodiilic brandy, flin whisky and imported sujamma," the Redguard woman rattled off. "Be careful and enjoy."

Bretagne sniffed it and scrunched up her nose. "Do I have to?"

"Drink it, drink it," Torvar started to chant. Then Athis joined in. "DRINK, DRINK, DRINK!" Soon, both men were banging their fists on the table, egging her on like a couple of children. Then, to make matters worse, the other bar patrons began to notice the commotion, and at least two others joined in encouragement.

Bretagne looked to Ria, who just shrugged. Succumbing to the pressure, Bretagne pinched her nose and gulped as much as she could before her lungs squeezed and she gasped for air.

"Oh, gods, it's like fire!" she exclaimed, panting. Athis laughed, and even Ria stifled a snort.

"Initiation ain't complete 'til you finish that," Torvar stated.

"Torvar! She's not a lush like you," Ria scolded. "Don't listen to him."

"Would that Njada were here," Bretagne choked out. "She'd keep you all in line, I bet."

"Ah, but she ain't," Torvar butted in, already slurring. "Good thing, too. She can be a real stick in the mud." He elbowed Ria in the ribs. "Prolly 'cause of that sick up her arse, eh? Ha!"

Athis shot him a dirty look but didn't say anything.

Later on, Ria dragged a very reluctant Bretagne to the firepit to dance. Mikael the Bard was playing something vaguely Bretic on the flute. Bretagne gently but firmly pried herself out of Ria's grip and sat down on a bench near the fire. She was a little dizzy and a lot drunk, so spinning around in circles didn't sound like the best idea. Not to mention, there wasn't enough alcohol in the world to dance in front of everyone. She'd much rather watch from a distance, sipping on her new mug of mead. Maybe I should've went with the apple juice, she wondered.

"Security in Whiterun is terrible," a man next to her said. "Shameful, is what it is."

"It is?" Bretagne supposed that striking up conversations with strangers was just something you did at a tavern.

"Aye. Used to be, there were so many guards for the walls, for patrols. But now it seems like, even with the war, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel."

Bretagne cocked her head to the side, thinking. "Now that you mention it, there doesn't seem to be as many as there were several weeks ago when I came to town."

"Ah, a newcomer." He extended his arm in welcome. "Sinmir."

"I'm Bret."

"If you ask me, you should've picked a different place to land," he said. "The guards in this city are all lazy and undisciplined. Things need to change…"

"I don't think they're lazy, necessarily," Bretagne countered. "Perhaps they're just shorthanded?"

Sinmir scoffed. "The Jarl and the Legion have got more gold than the gods themselves," he grumbled. "No good reason why they can't protect their own damn cities."

Bretagne frowned, thinking. Perhaps I could talk to Kodlak or Vil about possible solutions… Then she stood up, albeit too quickly. After steadying herself, she nodded to the man. "That gives me an idea. Thank you, Sinmir."

"Uh, don't mention it," he said, confused.

Bretagne went to the counter to get a refill–this time of apple juice–when suddenly, a tall, muscular blonde woman in full plate armor emerged from the corner table and approached her. "Say, I know you." She looked down her nose at the petite Breton, who was at least a head shorter. "You're that new member of the Companions." The woman motioned to the Rascals Three across the inn. "So, you what-fetch the mead?"

"I beg your pardon?" Bretagne was a bit taken aback by the sudden encounter, and from the woman's tone and demeanor, she certainly wasn't being friendly.

The woman smirked smugly and put a hand on her hip. "You're not from around here. That much is clear. Want a little advice? Get outta this city, and keep on walkin', softgut. This place is more than you can handle."

Bretagne scoffed and struggled to retain her composure–she was a lady, after all. "Excuse me? I'm not sure where this is coming from but I'm terribly sorry if I offended you, ma'am." Despite the booze, she knew she hadn't done anything wrong, but Bretagne knew when it was better to apologize to save face.

"I got no quarrel with you, but I won't turn one down, neither."

I don't even know you! Bretagne thought. Who does this woman think she is? That drink from earlier was giving her confidence, and though she was significantly smaller than the Nord, she chested up to the woman all the same. "You must really love to fight, then."

"You don't really know a woman 'til you've had a strong drink and a fistfight with her."

Bretagne was holding back anger and fear, now. She clenched her fists by her sides so hard, she left crescent indents in her palms. She had just been minding her own business, drinking her juice; she didn't ask to be confronted like this, and by someone so large and intimidating, too! Bretagne knew how she looked to others–meek, short, timid, definitely not a fighter. Couldn't this woman see that, as well? Bretagne nearly choked on her words. "And you want that with me?"

"A true Nord never misses a chance to test her worth."

Rage crept up Bretagne's throat and her face flushed with heat. "Sounds like you've got a grudge."

The woman nodded to the three warriors behind Bretagne who were now standing and watching, as were several other tavern-goers, quietly waiting to see what would happen. The music stopped, replaced by a palpable tension. "You been talking to those Companions of yours? 'Too hot-headed,' they cried. Weak, pathetic cowards, the lot of them!" she spat.

Bretagne whipped her head from the woman to her friends and back. "They rejected you?"

"It wasn't my fault! I told them over and over that it was an accident!" she exclaimed. "They wanted me to prove my worth, so they threw me up against a young whelp of a lad, hardly old enough to grow his first chin-hairs." The woman seemed to lose some of her confidence as she went on. "I guess they thought a woman wasn't strong enough to hurt him. I didn't mean for him to die! Why would I want that? I just... lost control!"

"You… you killed a child?!" Bretagne shouted, appalled. She almost never raised her voice, and was never prone to violence, but for this woman to insult the Companions, Bretagne's new family that she had grown to care for deeply, when she herself was a hypocrite? And a murderer? That was enough to ignite a burning fury within her. "How can you live with yourself?" Bretagne cried out. "And you have the audacity to insult my family in the same breath?! You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"You wanna defend their honor? Think you can go toe to toe with me? You'd be dead in six seconds."

An inhuman growl came from somewhere deep within Bretagne. "Come here!" Bretagne lunged for the woman, fully prepared to take a swing at her, but someone grabbed her around the waist, sweeping her off her feet just in the nick of time.

"All right, Princess, time to go," Athis said as he carried a kicking, shouting Bretagne away. Only when they were outside the Mare did Athis set her down, blocking the door with his body. "You gotta calm down, Bret."

"Did you hear her?! Ugh!" Bretagne ran her hands through her hair and took deep breaths. It wasn't helping much.

"She was just testing you to get a rise out of you. She loves to fight."

Bretagne breathed a little easier now. "Oh, so you know her?"

"Everybody knows her. Uthgerd the Unbroken. Supposedly, she's never lost a fight." Athis put his hands on the little Breton's shoulders. "She's just looking to prove herself. Just like the rest of us. Don't let her get in your head."

Bretagne exhaled deeply. Nearly all the tension was gone. "Well, perhaps she should try to fight someone a bit bigger." Shaking him off, Bretagne smoothed her skirts, squared her shoulders, jutted her chin up, and marched right back inside. She made a beeline for this Uthgerd woman, who was back at her seat. Uthgerd stood when she spied the tiny Breton woman approaching.

"Because I am a lady," Bretagne began, "I came to apologize for my behavior. It was impolite to judge you without even knowing your name. But I would appreciate it if you refrained from fighting those who pose no challenge to you. I know I could not best you in combat. Fighting those who are weaker, simply for an easy win is not honorable, and you seem like you are honorable, deep down." She put a hand on her tummy. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sleep off whatever it was my friends made me drink."

Uthgerd was momentarily stunned but shook it off. "Yeah, whatever."

.

.

.

The following night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Bretagne sat at her desk in her dimly lit room, the flickering candles casting long shadows on the wall. She had the city guard's financial records laid out before her and had been staring at the labyrinth of numbers and names for hours. After rubbing her eyes to stop the numbers from swirling, she took a deep breath and dove back into the sea of data.

Even though it was only a temporary position, Bretagne still prided herself on her meticulous attention to detail. But something just felt off tonight. On the surface, everything seemed fine, but the longer she worked, the more a nagging suspicion gnawed at her in her gut.

Her eyes scanned the seemingly endless columns of names and amounts as she flipped back and forth through the pages. Even in a city as wealthy as Whiterun, there were still significant gaps in literacy, but Bretagne had become accustomed to piecing together missing information and filling in the blank spots.

Even so, there weren't as many pages in this most recent month's ledger as she had expected. Perhaps that Sinmir last night was right, she wondered. Perhaps security really is severely lacking.

Suddenly, a discrepancy jumped out at her. A name on the payroll list that she hadn't seen before. "Alea Iacta?" Bretagne wondered aloud. "Who would name their child that?"

Cross-referencing the strange name with the employment records, she found no evidence that this person had ever been hired–at least not during the time of the ledgers she had been given.

"That's odd," she muttered, brow furrowing. She continued searching, and to her surprise, she found numerous other names that didn't correspond to any employment records. Some seemed like Imperial names, like Alea Iacta, or a mix of cultures, like Eduard Astra. Of course, Bretagne couldn't be the judge of normalcy when it came to names, given the strangeness of her own. But Venus Vidius Vicious, really? Not only were the names bordering on ridiculous, but she couldn't find any matching records to go with them.

For all intents and purposes, it was like these people never existed.

"No, no, no," she muttered, heart beginning to pound as she madly shuffled papers, "that can't be right."

The handwriting was also intriguing. Every legitimate record seemed to be written by the same hand or two–not unusual for only one or two individuals to be responsible for writing, especially since not everyone could. But every single silly name or inconsistent record was very clearly written by a single person, with a distinctive style: heavy and curly and scribbly.

With a shaking hand, Bretagne quickly wrote down the illegitimate records on a separate sheet. "There has to be more to this!"

She was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, because it certainly didn't seem to be a simple error. Deciding to dig deeper, Bretagne fished out the city's coffer records and compared them to the payroll logs. Soon a pattern emerged: when each faux employee was "hired," a moderate sum of money was detracted from the budget for "Security expenses," and occasionally marked "Miscellaneous."

But if those people weren't real, where was the money really going? Whoever was responsible for this was almost certainly using the guise of stipends for non-existent guards to siphon money from the city.

"If this is true," Bretagne whispered, voice trembling, "who would do something like this?"

She had to act fast. Scooping up the papers, she shoved them into an empty ledger and exhaled the breath she didn't know she was holding. She couldn't tell anyone about this: not yet anyway. Who knew how deep this ran?

Suddenly a wave of determination washed over her. She could feel her resolve hardening. First thing in the morning, she would take this straight to the Jarl. He needed to know the truth, and the guilty parties needed to be brought to justice. As a final measure of security, she locked the documents inside a small chest she had hidden under her bed. Even as she tucked away the key and blew out the candles, she couldn't shake the feeling that she had found something big, even life changing. And probably something that would have gone unnoticed had she not found it. As she lay back in bed, preparing for undoubtedly restless sleep, she knew the fate of the city's integrity and safety rested on her shoulders, and she was ready to fight for it.