12 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Proposal

"We need a better house" - Lucien was lying next to Lena in the Wolf Sanctuary in Cheydinhal, caressing her belly. "One with enough room and good security."

"This house has it all" - Lena looked at him in surprise. "Plenty of room, and what could be more secure than the Black Door in the basement?"

"And the well in the garden?" - Lucien shook his head. "No, that won't do. A child should not be seeing assassins coming and going every day."

Lena looked at him in disbelief, then started laughing.

"Are you serious?" - she was almost choking with laughter. "A child of two assassins will be seeing assassins every day! And besides, I'd like to know how you intend to keep Ocheeva away, once she decides to play the grandmother." They laughed at the thought. "Anyway, we have time to think about it. It isn't even showing yet. Much."

Lucien put his arm around her.

"You will need to take it easy now" - he said softly. "While this lasts."

"If you are suggesting that I sit still and do nothing all day, this isn't going to happen" - Lena was getting defensive. "I have no morning sickness even, there's no reason what-so-ever..." Lucien put his finger across her lips.

"Except protecting the child, of course" - he smiled.

Lena looked at him darkly, anger building up in her. "No."

Lucien knew better than to argue or to point out that she already started getting moody more than usual. He didn't expect her to agree to just stay at home, although he had to try.

"Will you marry me?" - he asked, looking into her eyes.

Lena almost jumped out of bed.

"Whatever for?!" - she couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Mara cannot add anything to what binds us already."

"True" - he touched her shoulder, settling her back down into the bed. She could never resist it when he touched her like that, letting a wave of calm wash over her. In such moments she so wished she was born an Imperial... "Marry me so that our child could have a surname, as well as both parents registered in the Imperial Archives. And so that he or she would not get teased by other children for being fatherless."

They looked at each other with one of those long gazes that seemed to carry a wordless conversation. Grown up without their own fathers, they both knew what he meant.

"Yes" - Lena nodded. "Yes, I will marry you."

Lucien smiled, kissed her and got up for more coffee.

"What about the house though?" - he passed Lena another sweetroll. "This one is big enough for the two of us, no doubt, and we could easily fit a crib, but we will soon outgrow it - especially if we have another child."

"Another child?" - Lena stopped eating.

"If you are up to it, of course" - Lucien smiled. "You didn't plan for this one, I know, yet you kept it."

"I just never saw myself having children..." - Lena admitted. "I got vampirism so early, and I just assumed that made children impossible... I suppose I am still surprised." She stared at her sweetroll, then got back to eating it. "But now that you say it..." - she raised her eyes to him. "But... I don't want to move out of here."

The formerly abandoned house in Cheydinhal was one of three places in Cyrodiil that Lena considered her homes, with the other two being the house in Bravil and the shack on the Waterfront in the Imperial City. Modest as they were, they had their comforts, and offered a refuge to Lena through all this time. And the abandoned house could not be repossessed, and was always there for her when she returned form the Shivering Isles. Besides, it was close to Fort Farragut and to Lucien. No, she could not give it up, especially not now that it was finally turned into a beautiful home. Lucien understood her sentiment.

"Perhaps rather than moving out, we could have it extended" - he looked at her, stroking her cheek. "We've been making changes in the Sanctuary anyway - the well entrance is behind another Black Door now, the one in the crypt, and the newly reopened tower entrance is for potential new recruits - it leads you through the entire crypt, no shortcuts. So then the Black Door in the basement of this house is just for you and me" - he smiled. "But I don't want children to have access to it."

Several cups of coffee and sweetrolls further, they worked out what they wanted built.

"Borba will be glad to take this on" - Lena mused, looking at a long list of changes and a drawing of a whole new house to be attached to the Wolf Sanctuary. "I suppose the Count won't object?"

"He won't, but you still need to submit all the relevant forms and applications in triplicate to the Imperial Offices" - Lucien grimaced. "Sometimes the paperwork can be harder than the actual construction."

"I'll do it" - Lena looked resolved. "Some of the clerks might still remember me. If you arrange the wedding - I am not on a good footing with Priests of Mara..." Lena recalled the incident in Dawnstar when Geralt chose Vaermina over a Priest of Mara - Lena would have done the same.

"Whatever did they do to you?" - Lucien laughed. "But don't worry, I'll go - they cannot refuse."

...

After seeing her father's ghostly apparition in Falkreath and learning that Hircine had picked both him and Geralt for his Great Hunt, Lena felt the need to return home for a while, but this time she went to Cheydinhal instead of Bravil. Her father had been marked by Hircine for the Great Hunt of the Third Era. Which side did he choose? And Geralt was marked for the Hunt of the Fourth Era. She thought she knew which side he'd be on... There was just one choice for Wolf, she thought. When would that be? And would he survive it?

Lena was pacing nervously back and forth in front of the fire. Lucien had gone to the Sanctuary downstairs - he had matters to attend to before leaving for Bravil. "Come to my office, I have business for you" - he said. She should go see what it was all about. Holidays in Skyrim were over.

12 Hearthfire, 4E202 - A trip on the cards

Lena went to see Lucien at the Sanctuary to see about that business he had for her. She found him at his desk buried in papers.

"Hello, Master Assassin" - she smiled at him mischievously. "Lots of contracts, is it?"

"I wish!" - he grimaced. "This all relates to one and the same matter, and it isn't even a contract. This is the business I want to give to you."

"Oh" - Lena swallowed. "Not a contract, but still lots of work... this doesn't bode well. What is it?"

"Trouble in the South" - Lucien dropped the scroll he was reading onto a pile of scrolls on the desk. "These are reports of attacks on Dark Brotherhood members in Valenwood and Elsweyr, some resulting in deaths of our assassins. Whoever is after them is skilled, to say the least, and stealthy - with all these reports I still cannot build a picture of who it is, or even if it is one person or an organisation."

"If it was in Morrowind, I'd wager on Morag Tong... But it isn't in Morrowind" - Lena looked through some of the reports. "No one is reporting killing the attacker either" - she raised an eyebrow. "How is it that they can't even tell if it's a man or a woman?"

"I know" - Lucien shook his head. "And it also does not preclude the possibility of a traitor." His brow furrowed.

"Yeah..." A few particularly graphic memories flashed before Lena's eyes. "Let's hope no Sanctuaries will need to be purified."

"The Night Mother does not even want to think about Purification, she has become far more reluctant to use it since last time. Besides, it could be an outsider. Your task is to investigate. Go South, travel, look around, listen. No one knows you there, which is why this job didn't go to one of our groups on the ground - it needs to be done by an outsider. I am not giving you any pointers to our Sanctuaries there either, you need to go completely fresh. Do not reveal who you are even if you get acquainted with one of our assassins there - it could be a traitor, you never know."

Lena nodded, taking it in.

"Any specific instruction?" - she looked on as Lucien packed away the scrolls, not letting her read any more of them.

"Don't get killed" - he smiled at her. "Visit at least some of the big cities, you won't have time to go everywhere. Meet me in Anvil in a month." He locked the scrolls into a cupboard behind his desk and walked over to Lena, taking her hand and pulling her close. "I am off to Bravil to arrange the wedding - say, six weeks ahead? I hear that's their usual schedule." Lena nodded. "Do you want to come along so you could write invitations before your trip or do you trust me to do it?"

"Invitations?" Lena hadn't thought of that side of it. "Party? Ugh..." - she grimaced.

"Just a small one - we need witnesses, you can't get married without witnesses" - Lucien smiled. "Besides, your friends would like to offer their moral support on the day you pledge yourself to the terrible Lucien Lachance" - he winked and thought that it might be the time for another Calm spell for Lena.

"Oh all right" - she sighed. "You do it. I think I'd rather face dangers unknown in Valenwood and Elsweyr."

13 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Office of Imperial Commerce

"Oh, these are grand plans!" - Borba was impressed when Lena showed her the plans to extend The Wolf Sanctuary that she and Lucien had worked out the day before. "Of course we'll do it! Will be happy to!" - Borba beamed at her. "It won't be cheap though, and I mean our side of it - construction and furnishings. The Office of Imperial Commerce will levy their own fees and taxes as well." She looked at Lena with commiseration.

"Yeah, so be it" - Lena looked resolved. "How much?"

"Let me see..." - Borba got out her ledgers. "Construction of a medium sized house as an extension of an existing one... Middle class furnishings with some upper class items thrown in... Garden planting with mature shrubs... Minus Brotherhood discount... That'll be 23,750 septims altogether" - she put down her quill.

"Brotherhood discount?" - Lena noticed that she's never had that before.

"Yes, well... It falls under the works we've done on the Sanctuary" - Borba looked dubious. "Doesn't it? You've got the Black Door in the basement! So I figure it falls under the Count's new scheme - the Brotherhood discount. Keeps things in the family, see."

"Oh I see" - Lena smiled at her and winked. "Say no more. But what about the paperwork?"

"I'll do the paperwork for the Count, but you need to do the Imperial City yourself" - Borba handed Lena a heavy stack of folded parchments. "Forms to fill in. Deliver those to the Office of Imperial Commerce and bring your purse - they won't authorise construction until you'll have paid the fees. And even Count Indarys won't go against the Imperial Bureaucracy."

...

"...and she made me pay 27,000 septims for the application!" - Lena was filled with indignation telling Hauk about it over dinner. "That's more than the cost of construction! And furnishings! It's all I had! It's like she knew it and simply charged me whatever I was carrying!!"

"Well, I'm sure it wasn't like that..." - Hauk looked very unsure as he said this. "I mean, there is no spell to see how much money you have on you, is there?"

"Perhaps not" - Lena sighed. "But the fact is that I am now broke and I have a long trip ahead of me - to Valenwood and Elsweyr."

"With any particular purpose?" - Hauk sensed that it wasn't a sightseeing trip.

"Yes..." - Lena fought the desire to tell him even though it was a Brotherhood matter, and therefore confidential. "Say..." - she looked at her friend with hesitation. "Would you come with me? I just need to go visit places without any clear-cut objectives... sorry, I can't say any more. A month of travelling in the South." Her eyes lit up.

"But of course I'll come with you!" - Hauk gave her a broad grin. "No need to talk about any of the details, it's not like I've never been on such missions myself" - he winked. "So it's a sightseeing trip after all." He chuckled. "When do we leave?"

"Tomorrow, if you are ready" - Lena smiled at him. "We'll need to clear out some caves and ruins along the way though, for money."

"Something will present itself, no doubt" - Hauk nodded. "There's no time for bounty hunting, I take it? Plenty of those notices everywhere."

"No" - Lena shook her head. "We should be aiming to cross the border as soon as possible. A month isn't a very long time to explore Valenwood and Elsweyr."

The conversation turned to practical matters, then Lena produced a map of the region.


"Strange - there does not seem to be any roads connecting cities of Valenwood and Elsweyr, no major roads anyway. Do the Khajiit and the Bosmer dislike each other so much?" - she raised her eyes at Hauk.

"Afraid so" - he nodded. "Have you not heard of the never ending wars between them?" He pulled the map closer. "There are plenty of border crossings though, I'm sure, even if they are not on this map. We'll just have to look around." He pushed the map back to Lena. "So you want to start in Elsweyr, then?"

"Yes, I was thinking Riverhold - it's just over the border, and we should be able to find it with or without roads. Then we'll go South."

"Well, don't pack any furs - it's hot out there and the Khajiit don't like smooth-skins wearing furs" - he winked. "And I must admit, seeing some Khajiit wearing fur armour here or in Skyrim, is decidedly odd..."

"But... they don't have fur covering their entire bodies, do they?" - Lena realised she's never seen a Khajiit naked. "I mean, I think their hands are free of fur, aren't they?"

"That depends on how much of it they shave off" - Hauk grinned. "It also varies per individual, but generally, yes, they have fur all over. Like Argonians have scales all over. Except may be for some... umm... soft spots."

Lena's eyebrows had been steadily going up and up and her mouth opening wider and wider as Hauk spoke, until she suddenly realised that she shouldn't say out loud what she was thinking - that this matter required investigation. She rearranged her face into a more neutral expression, but Hauk was already laughing - he'd read it, it was too late.

63: This portion starts off rather Fable-ish. When she's getting zapped out of bed, and so on. For some reason it sounds like a segment of gameplay in Fable. I can hear their voices, even! Ooh. But she's not back in Tamriel yet. Yikes! Bleak and gray. That's not so Fable-ish. Corpses and death. Oh my.

Oh cool, she's with the Witcher now. For a moment, anyway. Yeah that's right. She's in this weird limbo dream world, looking for Hauk. Hope she finds him.

Who is Philipa? (don't feel like Googling... I'm too engrossed in this story)

WHOA WHOA WHOA... Hauk with a blank face. BLANK face. You got it, Lena. That's how [offtopic] a deceased friend of mine appeared when I saw him in a dream, and it was HIM, not a fake version of him. His face was blank. And he could not speak English. Because wherever he is now, he no longer needs English. So we communicated by emotions: smiling, waving our arms, and so forth. [/offtopic] But the "blank" part. That's what his face was at first. Where did you get that from?

Well, she got him back. What a crazy set of chapters. It almost seems like not all of it was real.

Interesting, I didn't think of Fable at all. As for bleak and grey with corpses all over - that could be Fable, actually. Wraithmarsh.


That scene is from Witcher 3, the way I played it.


She's just some woman. Not important for our story, so I didn't bother introducing her. If you knew the Witcher, you'd know who she was, but it would add absolutely nothing to our story. Well, may be some undercurrent, some texture, but nothing essential.


Personal experience.


To quote a certain Professor: "Yes, it is all in your head, but it doesn't make it any less real."

Glad you liked it! It was a wild ride to write. A lot of it comes from personal experience. Yeah, I know... crazy vampires!

Thank you Lena, yeah your tales are always enjoyable. This one was definitely wilder than usual.

By Fable-ish I meant the constant zapping of your character. For some reason it seems like a cut-scene from that game. To me.

Sorry I go off on tangents with my comments and such. I get carried away and haven't got much of a social life right now. But hey, everyone by now has dealt with this in their stories. But I'll try to reign back in the future.

64: Jowan is right. Some of those dreams were not dreams at all. I agree.

Wow, did Hauk actually want to remain deceased? You know... Warriors who die in battle and all that. Seems as though he's just gotten into a bit of a tiff with Lena?

Rubies are indeed rare.

Please don't reign anything back. It is nice to hear how different people see things - it doesn't have to be the same as me, that would be boring!

Regarding Fable, now you mention that cutscene with zapping, I see where you're coming from. I forgot about that bit, yes, I suppose it's similar, although the Fable hero gets zapped with an entirely different intent (in fact the opposite). There's quite a lot of zapping in Fable.


You think so? I am not actually sure how he felt about that. He was flattered of course that she went after him, but would he have preferred to be left alone? The answer is: I don't know! He didn't send her away though when she found him in the Fade, so I suppose he decided to return to Mundus for now. There are still some Ayleid ruins that need exploring, after all. Some even have rubies.

13 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The Cartographers Guild

"Are you one Lena Wolf?" - a well-dressed Khajiit entered the King and Queen tavern where Lena and Hauk were having dinner. He approached their table and nodded to Lena. "This one is Sa'Shalim, a senior member of the Imperial Cartographers Guild." He looked at Lena expectantly, as if it made it clear what he wanted.

"Pleased to speak with you" - Lena answered politely, putting down her fork. "How can I be of service?"

"Khajiit has heard that Wolf is planning a trip to Elsweyr" - Sa'Shalim offered, putting a large scroll in front of Lena. "This is the current map of Elsweyr from the Cartographers Guild. The Guild would kindly request Wolf to verify it on the ground and perhaps make some corrections." He gave Lena a broad smile, nearly disappearing behind it.

"Oh sure, I can look into that" - Lena smiled back at him, picking up the scroll and unrolling it on the free end of the table. "But..." - she looked at Hauk but his perplexed look offered no help. "But this scroll is blank!" - both Lena and Hauk were now staring at Sa'Shalim in disbelief.

"Yes, well, so Wolf understands the Guild's predicament" - Sa'Shalim continued hiding behind his big smile. "The map needs some refinements."

"Oh, is that all" - Lena grimaced, rolling up the blank scroll. "Why doesn't your Guild at least buy some of these commercial maps like this one I've got here?" She unrolled her own map, which, imprecise as it may be, was filled in rather better than Sa'Shalim's blank scroll.

Sa'Shalim's smile vanished.

"Is Wolf aware that this is one of the two mutually contradicting maps circulating in the lay society?" - he looked at Lena sternly. "The Cartographers Guild cannot accept such unverified material!" He bared his fangs briefly, then put another scroll in front of Lena. "But since Wolf already has one of the two versions of the map, she should also have the other."

"Oh!" - Lena and Hauk both bent over the two maps. "This second map has a much larger Senchal peninsular, but no marked location in Valenwood at all! Why is that?"

"Because neither map can be trusted!" - Sa'Shalim exclaimed rather louder than he would have liked. Several people turned to look at him. "This is why the Cartographers Guild cannot accept either version of the map" - he said in a much softer tone. "The Guild needs to know which is the correct version, but the Guild suspects that it may be neither - the truth might be somewhere in between!" He looked around, making sure that the other diners went back to their own meals and conversations. "There is also a suspicion..." - he looked around again, then pulled up a chair, sitting down and leaning towards Lena and Hauk who also leaned towards him, with the three of them nearly banging their heads over the maps. "There is a suspicion that when Martin Septim shuttered the Amulet of Kings, it wasn't just Kvatch that got duplicated." He looked at Lena and Hauk with significance. "Yes, of course the Cartographers Guild knows about that, but that peculiar phenomenon does not change the map! Both cities cover the same ground. Not so with the area of Southern Valenwood and Elsweyr." He sat back in his chair and poured himself some wine.

"But surely..." - Lena was still trying to digest this revelation. "Surely people have gone there! And returned to tell the tale? After all, the Oblivion Crisis happened two centuries ago!"

"People have gone there, and many Khajiits have come from there" - Sa'Shalim nodded, sipping the wine. "Sa'Shalim knows as he tried to talk to as many of them as he could. But..." - he stared into his goblet in confusion. "Some of them tell one thing, others tell the other. Reports of mainland Elsweyr seem to be consistent, but the further South or West in Elsweyr one goes, the more contradicting those reports become. Even to the point..." - he looked around the tavern again to make sure that no one was listening in. "Even to the point that some claim Valenwood to be devoid of any settlements..." He shook his head and sat back in his chair.

"Well, surely..." - Hauk started, not believing that last version. "Even with the Bosmer-Khajiit wars..."

"Exactly!" - Sa'Shalim interrupted him, indicating that this topic was not to be discussed in public. "So Champion Wolf and Optio Serck-Hanssen both see the importance of this mission, as well as the need for discretion!" He looked at them sternly and got up. "The Imperial Cartographers Guild wishes the Champion and Optio good fortune in their expedition to the Southern reaches of the Empire and expect a better report from them than what they have been receiving so far."

And with that he nodded to Lena and Hauk and left the tavern.

"Some sightseeing trip this is promising to be" - Hauk smirked, comparing the two maps before him. "Elsweyr seems to be the same on both maps though, just as Sa'Shalim said, so your plan to start with Riverhold is good. The trouble - the rift, the duplication, whatever is going on down there - begins only further on."

"Yes, that would explain those reports too..." - Lena started saying, then caught herself. Yes, this would explain the bizarre reports about the attacks on the Dark Brotherhood members that she needed to investigate, and it would also explain why Lucien didn't want her to read them. He must have spotted this geographic inconsistency, he must have had both versions of the map, must have seen the problem... and didn't tell her anything about it, letting her discover it all for herself. And relying on her discretion... even with Hauk, who now put a finger across his lips.

"No-no, don't tell me. We are going to do some exploration for the Imperial Cartographers Guild. We needed a good cover, and it just presented itself." He smiled, rolling up both maps. "You keep your mission to yourself, just as I keep quiet about mine" - he added with a wink.

"You too?" - Lena burst out laughing. "I should have known. All right, Optio - let's keep our respective missions out of the business with the Cartographers Guild."

The trip looked more interesting by the minute.

13 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Memories of a desert

"Haven't you been to a desert before?" - Lena raised her eyes to Hauk after that most intriguing conversation with the representative of the Imperial Cartographers Guild. "Or may be even been to Elsweyr before?"

"I've been to a desert, but it wasn't Elsweyr" - Hauk nodded, signalling the waiter for more mead. "It was the Savannah in Antaloor."

"Yes, I've been meaning to ask you about that!" - Lena exclaimed with excitement. "Do tell!"

"It's a long story, but it does hold a lot of fond memories" - Hauk looked into the distance, remembering. "I suppose we have a long way ahead of us before we even get to Elsweyr, and even now the night is still young... It was just over ten years ago when my argument with Traven got a little out of hand, with Iver just only managing to pull me away before fireballs started flying... He got me to Anvil and onto a ship - things had to cool off, and I had to be out of the picture."


17 Sun’s Dawn, 4E192 – Hauk arrives in Antaloor

Hauk was labelled a troublemaker for speaking out against limiting the types of spells available to battlemages. The new Arch Mage started by banning Necromancy and proceeded by introducing a code of conduct for the members of the Mages Guild, starting with the battlemages. Although Travis could not ban other schools of magic, he declared it not becoming a battlemage to use spells of Illusion and Conjuration. Hauk disagreed.

With the war of words escalating, Hauk felt he wasn't too far off from being labelled a necromancer and put on the other side of the divide. He didn't want that and decided to go away for a while, let things cool off. He boarded a ship bound for Antaloor and was gone.

The ship moored somewhere along the coast of the Savannah of Erimos. It wasn't even a real port, just a beach with some caves. No matter, Hauk had arrived in Antaloor as agreed, so he disembarked, found a horse and went looking for civilisation.

The Savannah was warm, dry and the ground felt solid under the horse's hoofs - a welcome change after several weeks at sea. Hauk came across some strange animals not found in Cyrodiil - giant ants, big flightless birds on long legs, huge tough skinned creatures with a single thick horn on their nose - but also some familiar creatures like boar, just as aggressive and deadly as in Cyrodiil. The flightless birds were easy to kill with a few fireballs and tasted better than rats when roasted. Hauk could have stayed in Savannah by himself for a long time, were it not for the lack of water. He came across a few abandoned hamlets and villages, finding their wells all but dried out. "People must have fled the drought" - he thought. "I need to find a larger settlement."

Going North, he found Bayan. It was full of people, many of whom indeed came from the empty villages that he passed. There was water but no food - the town didn't have enough supplies for everyone and the drought killed their crops. They took to eating horses! But horses were also their livelihood, so they tried to leave horse meat to the last resort. Hauk shared some of the flightless bird meat with the locals - they were ever so grateful. "Why don't they just go out into the Savannah and hunt those birds themselves?" He wondered. But he was a battlemage, and they were not, and the Savannah had a lot of hostile surprises for one who could not toss a fireball or two.

"Are you a mercenary?" - someone asked. Hauk never thought of that, but it seemed the logical thing to do. Yes, he would be a mercenary!

"There is work for hunters and mercenaries, you know. Talk to Alima - our leader - she'll tell you what needs doing. Besides bringing more of that Ostrich meat, that is."

Alima was the local healer for people and horses alike, but preferred horses. She welcomed an offer of help from Hauk and even promised to give him a decent horse if he got some medicinal roots for it first. "Are you trying to tell me that your best horse is sick?" This did sound fishy.

"I promise I am not trying to cheat you!" - protested Alima. "It is indeed our best horse but it got poisoned by a giant ant. I can brew a potion to clear the poisoning, I just need mint roots for that."

"Ok, where do I find these mint roots?"

"You don't. They are roots - they are in the ground and you don't see them."

"Whaaa-"

"Calm down. Ostriches like them. Kill a few ostriches, cut out their stomachs, retrieve mint roots. Unsavoury but simple."

"You sure do have strange ways..."

"Welcome to the Savannah! And watch out for those giant ants - they are both tough and poisonous."

Ostriches were easy prey, and soon Hauk had a good horse - and it was in fact a good strong horse, not a weak one that he was riding before. Alima also gave him a book on Antalorian flora and fauna - useful both for brewing potions and for making roasts.

"Anything else I can do for you?" - Hauk was hoping for a job.

"Well, you could try to help us with our drought and famine problem" - Alima offered. "It won't be easy, but if you succeed, there'll be a good reward in that, as well as a regular payment and our gratitude. You need to convince our neighbours in Halnin to resume trading with us again."

That sounded easy enough, but Hauk knew that it wasn't. Easy tasks do not have a reward as well as a payment attached to them. He came to Antaloor seeking adventure, and this was it.



The Savannah surely has strange creatures, and the people have strange ways. Take their horses for example - I haven't seen a lazier animal! You have to keep kicking it and nudging it on, or it slows down to walking and even stops if fancy takes it. You dismount, and it might stay where you left it, or it might not. "Our horses are free!" - I was told. This is great in theory, less great in practice when a horse walks away with your saddlebags on and you need to get another horse to chase your saddlebags across the Savannah.

Another strange thing is Varns. They are essentially jackals walking upright and using tools and weapons. They've got shamans too, not unlike our goblins. But varns are really not that aggressive usually, they keep to their camps which they defend, and they hunt wild animals for food. Some of them even master human speech. So why then are they considered a threat? Apparently, every so often they get organised and attack human settlements or more likely isolated hamlets, searching for new tools and weapons because they don't make their own. So then people hold a grudge. It seems to me though that simple trade could be the answer here... but then people would have no scapegoats - ah, now we are getting somewhere!

But the most remarkable thing is perhaps the Antalorian teleportation system and the fact that no one uses it. It was installed millennia ago by an old race that lived in Antaloor before humans had moved in, and possibly even before dwarves had lived there before them. Teleport nodes are everywhere, but mostly inactive. You need a teleportation stone connected to an active teleport node, and then as you travel around, you can activate other teleports to work with your stone, thus building up your network. However, someone somewhere has to maintain the network, or else "your trip might be cut short" meaning that you could find yourself anywhere between your node of departure and your destination. Like in the open sea, on top of a mountain or in the middle of the Savannah. Oh, I think I start seeing why people prefer to travel by horse, lazy or not!

But with all that, Savannah is enchanting and people are friendly and welcoming. I could very well spend months and months here... time seems to have lost its meaning.

20 Sun's Dawn, 4E192 - Rustler's Run

Halnin lay East of Bayan. It was a fishing village on the North coast of Erimos. The leader Altan refused outright to resume trade with Bayan saying that money meant nothing in times of drought. Yet Hauk sensed that there was more to this refusal.

"You can run a horse race, and if you can improve on my best time, then you can be the leader here and give orders."

These Savannah people sure had strange customs.

"Ok, you're on!" - Hauk was not one to back down, especially since it wasn't required to beat the best time from the first attempt. You could try as many times as you wanted!

With the Rustler's Run beaten, Altan had another card to play: it was drought, don't you know, our wells are all dry, we need water. You want to be the leader here, you sort it out! Surely, this was a ruse?

And it was. Hauk chatted to some locals that led him to termite mounds as beacons of water. Dig near a mound and you've got water even during a drought. Undoubtedly, Altan knew that. So what was going on?

"It's not that simple" - Altan tried to sound important. "I can't just make decisions here, I have to discuss them with someone."

"But you are the leader!"

"All I can say is go to the lighthouse and see for yourself."

What kind of monster was Hauk to face in the lighthouse? A demon? A daedra? Or an angry god perhaps? Did they even have daedra in Antaloor?

No, it was just a woman with a big stick - your local mafia representative Selene. She was glad to make Hauk's acquaintance, she heard so much about him. Oh! but did Hauk already have the papers required for the passage to Hatmandor? Because she would be ever so glad to provide Hauk with some, and it wouldn't even be a forgery. All Hauk had to do was to help her organisation remove Alima from her position as Bayan's leader, and the organisation would provide food to Bayan immediately.

Hauk wasn't born yesterday. He liked Alima - she was straight talking and in spite of her stern looks, seemed to really care for Bayan. Hauk was not about to sell that village to Selene's organisation. Selene didn't like that answer, she didn't like it at all. She brandished her big stick which turned out to be an enchanted four-pronged fork on a very long handle, and tried to make holes in Hauk. She even succeeded at first - Hauk nearly fell off the lighthouse platform! But he caught himself, called up a summon, tossed a few fireballs and mostly just rammed Selene with his shield until it was she who was falling off the lighthouse tower. And no, she couldn't fly.

Altan couldn't believe his ears when Hauk told him that Selene had met with an unfortunate accident.

"You killed her!" - Altan was turning very pale. "Her organisation will surely crush us now!"

"Well, then you can tell them where to find me, since I believe it is my right to assume leadership of this village? Seeing how I beat your best time on that horse race?"

Altan talked himself into a corner now. Yes, they will resume trade with Bayan as normal. And... err... would Mr. Serck-Hanssen be so good as to not mention to Alima his win of the Rustler's Run? Unless of course he planned to settle down in Halnin and take over running the village?

The change of tone was remarkable. No, Hauk didn't want to run the village, Altan was welcome to stay on as the leader.

Back in Bayan people were celebrating. It is remarkable how quickly the first shipment from Halnin reached them. You'd think they used a teleportation system! Hauk claimed his reward from Alima who was visibly relieved. She had a stash of enchanted leather trousers - would Hauk like a pair for mages, for archers or for warriors? Archers - no, but it was a tough choice between mages and warrior gear. Hauk chose mages gear.

Magic in Antaloor was fascinating. The local mages combined enchanted cards in a locket, creating a new combined enchantment. Then they used a staff to channel that enchantment into a spell. Although Hauk could still cast basic element spells from his wrist, they weren't coming out as powerful as he was used to, and his summons lacked stamina. He needed to master the local system to tap into the magic field of Antaloor which was obviously somewhat different from Tamriel. The best place to meet local mages was the local Mages Guild which occupied a tower not far from Hatmandor. But the desert gates to Hatmandor were closed, except to those who carried a permit to pass, an application for which could be submitted to the Imperial office in Hatmandor. "So seeing how you are here and Hatmandor is on the other side of this gate, I don't see how you are going to get through" - the guard was ever so helpful.

Wasn't Selene offering just this document? Perhaps Hauk had been a bit rush... But no, there must be another way!


21 Sun's Dawn, 4E192 - The gates to Hatmandor

Finding a way to get through the gates to Hatmandor became Hauk's main occupation. The village of Bayan was bustling with life now, people were coming and going, trade flourishing. Surely, some of these people would know ways...

"Pssst, over here!" - Hauk was pulled into a porch. "I can help you get through the gates to Hatmandor."

"I'm listening."

"There's this old smugglers' route, you see, I know a fellow who knew a fellow who used it. I can tell you where it is for a mere 300 auras."

"You must be joking!"

"Suit yourself."

This conversation was repeating itself with several strangers - did the whole village know about this route? Probably. At the third proposition Hauk merely laughed. As amusing as it was, he seemed to be the only person around who didn't know where it was. Finally, a widow that he had shared his ostrich meat with on the first day, saw him talking to various shady characters, and she guessed the topic.

"You helped me, so I'll try to help you now. I know the smugglers' route, but be warned that this is why I am a widow - it is dangerous, and my husband perished there. Go talk to the grave digger, he'll tell you of the dangers. But if you still decide to go, here's where it starts" - and she showed Hauk a well hidden opening between rocks, just behind the cemetery. A coincidence? Hauk decided to talk to the grave digger.

"Oh yes, last time we were hauling body parts for days!" - the grave digger seemed amused. "But why bother with a smugglers' route when you can get a proper document?"

"But I thought you could only get it in Hatmandor?"

"Now, what would be the point of that? Once you get to Hatmandor, you won't need a pass any more, would you now?"

Were the locals making fun of Hauk or did this grave digger have a twitch in his eye?

"I've got a job for you if you are going that way, you see. And I want you to get there safely. So I'll tell you how to get the papers on this side of the gate. Go talk to the old scribe about last year's weather."

The old scribe had been a forger, but alas - his bottle of Imperial Red ink was still buried under the rubble of his burned down house when the Imperial Guard caught up with him one time too many. Bring him that bottle, and he'd work his magic again to create an authentic Imperial document.

Hauk was getting a distinct impression of going in circles. But the circles seemed to lead somewhere - there was the smugglers' route, and now there was also a possibility of professionally forged documents, as well as several ready made forgeries that were too obvious even to Hauk.

Very well, searching for ink it was. It wasn't easy, but wild animals would not stand in the way of progress. With the papers ready, Hauk decided to see what the grave digger's job was.

"Here - deliver this to the undertaker along the way." The grave digger tossed him a sack. "It's the head, the undertaker has got the body already."

What?! The look on Hauk's face must have spoken volumes.

"Oh, the chap took a piss on Sam's son's grave, so Sam cut his head off, and it took us this long to find it. The body had been taken away already" - the grave digger explained, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. If so, Antaloor was an odd place.

But a battlemage is not afraid of a detached head, especially if it's bagged. Hauk stashed it away and set off to Hatmandor.

27 Sun's Dawn, 4E192 - Reesa

"Reesa? What are you doing here?" - Hauk saw Reesa get up from her seat as he approached the house of an unfortunate youth he was sent to eliminate.

"Don't do it" - she stood in his way, swaying her hips. "Leave him alone."

"Out of my way, Reesa."

She stepped aside, and Hauk entered the house.

...

Reesa was an interesting young woman, from head to toe. "Very gifted", as their boss described her - she was a hostess at the local gambling establishment, the place for the rich to relax and enjoy themselves. Reesa would serve drinks, play the lute and carry an engaging conversation. A private audience could be arranged as well, "but you don't have that kind of money" - the boss smirked, looking Hauk over. Reesa was also the boss' trusted agent, although Hauk thought that trust was misplaced - Reesa clearly had her own agenda, which made her a woman to stay away from, regardless of her talents.

Hauk wasn't insensitive to women, and Reesa's swaying hips and exposed bosom were very distracting - which is why he stayed away from her as much as he could. For a double agent like himself, the game was dangerous enough already without an intimate involvement with another agent of an unknown affiliation - remember, Hauk didn't think that Reesa was actually working for their boss.

What Hauk did or didn't do in the house of the unfortunate youth, was Hauk's business. What was Reesa's involvement in that? He was pretty sure she didn't work for the Captain, and she wasn't sent by the boss. Perhaps things would become clearer later, but until then Hauk would do well to look at someone else's bosom.

...

Once Hauk finally managed to get past the closed desert gates at Bayan, his trip to Hatmandor was fairly straightforward. Some zombies here, some varns there, nothing he couldn't handle. A few mages remaining at the old Mages Guild taught him the basics of the local system and were only too glad to offer him the necessary tools - the trade was still booming, even though officially all mages were declared traitors by the Benevolent Emperor Gondohar. Fortunately, mages weren't actually hunted down, although many chose to disappear as a precaution - and perhaps this was what the Emperor had intended.

Finally reaching Hatmandor, Hauk found a locked gate and two guards barring his way.

"Hatmandor is closed, except for official business only" - they told him.

"Why? What happened?" The look on Hauk's face must have been extremely perplexed, because the guards had a good laugh before explaining.

"Hatmandor is closed on Captain's orders. Captain of the Guard, that is. There's been a murder."

"Oh? But that has nothing to do with me!" - Hauk protested. "How do I get in?"

"You don't." There was no bounds to the guards' helpfulness. "Go see the Captain at the inn in Cheznaddar - if he says you can come in, you can come in, but not before."

Right. Cheznaddar was a neighbouring town, so close, you'd think it was a suburb of Hatmandor.

"I bet there's more than one way into Hatmandor" - Hauk thought to himself, looking over the two desert cities. "I bet they share sewers. And may be I can scale some of the those rocks."

Those were both good ideas, but it was getting late and Hauk was getting hungry and tired, so an inn sounded better than any of those other options.

...

"You're new in town" - the Captain muttered into his beer when Hauk sat down next to him at the bar.

"Very perceptive of you" - Hauk replied, not addressing anyone in particular.

"I have a job for you" - said the Captain to his mug.

"And what might that be?" - Hauk questioned the mutton chops that the barman put in front of him.

"Investigate a serial killer" - the Captain turned around, talking to the vulture on the rafters.

"All right, but I need to get into Hatmandor" - Hauk replied, stabbing the chop on his plate.

"Of course" - the Captain got up to leave. "See you there."

...

"Go see Basel at the Under the Influence - that's a tavern here in Hatmandor" - the Captain was explaining things to Hauk the next day. "A tavern, or rather a gambling establishment. Shady, yet not illegal, and I've got nothing on him. Yet. But he always looks for new blood - he deals with the Underworld, I just know it. The murders I need you to investigate - the victims were all high ranking members, or at least I think they were - I've got nothing on them either!"

"Err... what have you got then?" - this was a bit too much conjecture for Hauk's taste.

"Not much. Which is where you come in. Whatever information you can find - on the murders or on the Underworld, I'll pay for." The Captain's eyes were hard, but Hauk met his gaze without flinching. "I see we understand each other" - the Captain smiled. "Agent." Hauk raised an eyebrow, but the Captain reassured him: "Oh, not from here. But you've been an agent for many years, or am I wrong?"

He wasn't wrong. Hauk smiled and nodded.

...

"Well, have you got the package?" - Reesa was swaying her hips at Hauk as he emerged from the trapdoor. "Give it to me. Basel sent me."

"Umm..." - Hauk watched her hips, then moved his eyes up to her bosom. "I prefer to deliver it myself. Reesa." His eyes finally made it to hers.

"All right" - she smiled, brushing away an edge of her top revealing just a little more. "But have you got it?"

"Whaaa--" Hauk finally managed to look at her face. "Oh, the package. Yes, I've got it right here." He patted a rather large package stuck under his arm. Had she not seen it?

"All right" - an edge of Reesa's loincloth moved aside - that garment could not be called a skirt! "Then deliver it directly to the customer. Are you paying attention?"

"Of course!" With an immense effort Hauk raised his eyes to her face again. "Customer. Which is who?" What was she trying to achieve?

"He'll meet you behind the Temple of Maliel. North of town?" - she half-opened her mouth in anticipation. This was a talented woman indeed!

"Right. See you around, Reesa."

Hauk brushed past her and walked away.

"Mmm... you don't fool me" - thought Reesa. "But you're a mage - normal people don't have that kind of willpower. Good. I like mages. Battlemages" - she corrected herself, watching Hauk expertly putting down a couple of varns with his battleaxe. Reesa acquired a target.

oh dear Hauk is in trouble plenty!

The sound of singing as he walks briskly away.

♫"Come a little bit closer
You're my kind of man
So big and so strong
Come a little bit closer
I'm all alone and the night is so long"♫

65: Yep, the Mages Guild doesn't really see that many poisons. Might wanna try Gilded Carafe. Or Ogier's shop for the ingredients. Doesn't the University also have a bunch of ingredients for picking? I seem to remember they do.

Frostcrag is awesome. Love the style of that place. Ha ha sounds like those goblins got to live another day. Maybe Lothran will take care of that...




Okay, thanks.



Yes, and a lot of humor in Fable as well as stuff like this goes along.



I like this answer: "I don't know." Yes, that's good and honest. Even though these are our creations, I also don't know everything either about them, either. I like learning as I go.

14 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The Old Crow Inn

"Oh, that Reesa reminds me of someone here in Cyrodiil" - Lena laughed, interrupting Hauk's story. They had set off from the Imperial City on their journey South and were just approaching the Old Crow Inn at the junction of the Red Ring Road and Gold Road.

"Whoever do you mean?" - Hauk looked at her with suspicion, a long string of faces flashing before his eyes. Could she know of any of them? Nah, impossible!

"A certain Orc that the publican here asked me to kill" - Lena turned to look at Hauk, clearly enjoying his worried expression.

"An Orc?" - Hauk replied casually, still holding his breath. That was an old story indeed... Whichever of the Orcs she meant... Oh, wait - something to do with the local publican. So, none of what he was thinking. Good. He exhaled with relief. Lena laughed.

"And here I was thinking that it's just the sanguine eyes that would always get you going. But I see that green skin can have the same effect..." - she chuckled.

"Well, may be. Or may be not. Not any more anyhow, not after..." - he smiled at her, realising that she'd been fishing and got him. "Never mind that. What was it about an Orc that you had to kill?"

"An Orc seductress who led away this lady's mate" - Lena explained, making a mental note to find out about Hauk and the Orc... Orcs... whatever. "I had to kill that mate as well, of course, so the lady is now unattached, and she's a Dunmer..." - Lena added, pushing the door to the inn.

...

"Well, hello!" - the publican beamed at Lena seeing her come in. "And a warm welcome to your friend as well!" - she beamed at Hauk too whose broad grin told her all she needed to know. "You can use the basement room as before, it's ready for you. Would you care for something to eat first?"

A most pleasant evening was about to commence. Lena and Hauk sat down for dinner, even though it wasn't particularly late in the day yet, but hey - here was a friendly inn and good food, and they were not likely to walk away from that in a hurry. Elsweyr could wait - they would get up early in the morning and make up the time tomorrow.

The basement room was well-furnished, clean and tidy, just as Lena left it last time. Hauk noticed the excavation deeper in and a strange door that was locked. He asked Lena about it.


"The person who furnished this room was looking for some rare artefact and tracked it down to here. Apparently there's a tomb behind this door, and the artefact is there. But we are not going in" - she added firmly.

"Oh? Why not?" - Hauk felt there was more to the story. "Since when did you stop poking your nose into every mystery you come across?"

"I didn't" - Lena grinned. "I tracked down the fellow who dug this up. I found his corpse hanging upside down in his house."

"And?" Corpses never stopped Lena before.

"Some numbnut followed me there and declared that if I were to go into that tomb, the same would happen to me."

"And that put you off?" - Hauk couldn't quite believe it.

"No, not that. He also said that the artefact in question was gifted to their dead relative by one of the Divines, that the artefact was powerful and should be left interred with its owner." She looked at Hauk, but seeing that he was still not satisfied with her explanation, she added: "It isn't one of Pelinal's relics, but it sounded very much like it. I just don't want to touch anything Divine."

"All right" - Hauk nodded, but kept his eyes on Lena. "What have you done?"

"Oh nothing out of the ordinary" - she smiled at him. "Nothing unusual, if that's what you mean. I'm just not that devoted, you know... All right, yes, I pray to Arkay and he seems to accept me, but I wouldn't be so sure about the others, what with my occupation and all..."

"Wolf, stop beating about the bush" - Hauk looked at her sternly. "You are not the only assassin around. You've never had troubles before. Something's happened. What is it?"

"I... well..." - she sat down. "I spoke with Sithis. I nearly went with him, too." She looked at Hauk in despair.

"And that got you worried?" - Hauk took her hand. "Don't. He's an Old God, older than the Divines, the Daedra, older than Nirn itself! You've been to the Fade again, then?"

"Yes, for the wraith exorcism at the old Pale Pass Fortress - Geralt sent me to get the wraiths to come to Mundus to fight."

"So. And there the Void found you. How did you return?"

"My baby" - Lena put her hand on her belly, the baby just moved inside. "Reminded me where I belonged. And Sithis let me go - I think I've been marked now."

"Marked with what? Don't talk rubbish" - Hauk shook his head. "You've been listening to the priests too much. Sithis does not consume souls, and neither does he mark mortals in any way."

"How do you know?"

"I've been to the Fade too" - Hauk smiled at her. "When I died, remember?"

"Sithis?"

"Was there. Said it wasn't my time. Then you turned up."

They sat in silence for a while - this brought up a lot of memories.

"Lucien and I plan to get married - in the Temple" - Lena looked up at Hauk. "We shall need Mara's blessing."

"And you're worried she'd strike you down instead?" - Hauk's expression cleared. So this was what it was all about!

"Well..." - Lena sighed. "We're not exactly pious. And Geralt killed that priest back in Dawnstar for Vaermina..."

"You worry unnecessarily - again!" - Hauk exclaimed, topping up her goblet with the better Tamika wine. "The Divines don't strike people down... Well, Mara doesn't anyway... You'll be fine. When's the wedding?"

"After we're back from Elsweyr. Lucien is arranging it - you'll get a letter with the date and everything."

"You're doing the right thing getting married" - Hauk looked at her approvingly. "The child will need both parents registered in the Imperial Archives."

"That's what Lucien said too" - Lena nodded. "That's why I agreed. But Hauk - what if the child is yours?"

"It doesn't matter, Wolf" - Hauk said softly. "I'll be around for as long as you want me, I am not backing away, but I am not your man. You chose Lucien. And he accepted the fatherhood, so be it. We won't fight over it, he and I, our bonds are stronger than that."

"Your bonds?" Lena felt that there was another world hiding behind those words, the world she had so far had no inkling about.

"I can't tell you, Wolf, I am sorry" - Hauk smiled with regret. "May be one day, but not now. We've known each other for a long time, Lucien and I - but you knew that. Let's just say, we've shared so much, that sharing a child with the woman we both love feels like the most natural thing ever." He paused, looking at her intently over his mead. "And besides, you're my best friend."

Lena sighed, watching Hauk across the table. He was her best friend, and more. She decided to focus on "friend", the rest was just too complicated. But she no longer worried about Mara refusing to join two assassins in marriage.

...

The night was quiet and the following morning they got up with the first light and took the Gold Road South towards Riverhold.

10 First Seed, 4E192 - Old Yrseke - Tongue - Reesa

"I have another job for you" - Basel waved Hauk to come in. "Escort."

"I'm listening." Hauk propped himself up against the fireplace in Basel's office. It was a very comfortable room - Basel used to spend a lot of time in it.

"I want you to accompany Old Yrseke to a business meeting. And I want you to make sure nothing goes wrong." Basel fixed Hauk with his gaze, trying to gauge whether Hauk understood what was required of him.

"No problem, I'll make sure no harm befalls him" - Hauk smiled. "Escort" meant "bodyguard" in this context, and the business meeting was unlikely to take place anywhere with guards.

"Oh good" - Basel smiled back. "Then we understand each other. Old Yrseke will fill you in on the necessary details himself - he's downstairs."

...

"Yes, I thought it might be you" - Old Yrseke nodded when Hauk asked for details. "Basel was pleased with your services so far. So you know what you are needed for this time, and that's all you need to know. Follow me, stay a little behind, remain unobserved, don't let others think you're with me. When we are there, follow my lead and, well, keep me alive. Any questions?"

Hauk had plenty of questions, but he also saw that he wouldn't get any answers. So he checked his gear by way of an answer and looked up.

"Ready when you are."

...

The meeting was in the sewers. Old Yrseke let Hauk handle a few mummies barring their way, and soon they reached a domed intersection.

"This is the place, the other party should be here shortly" - Old Yrseke turned to Hauk. "Now, I was supposed to come alone, so it's best you hide and don't come out unless... err... necessary."

Hauk just only crouched behind some crates when three men walked in from the other end of the room.

"Three against one" - Hauk thought. "Not good."

The first man looked unarmed but wasn't, the other two men were his bodyguards, armed and armoured. Old Yrseke didn't flinch and didn't look nervous at all, his sword in full view. The negotiations didn't go very well - there was a disagreement on price, but Hauk had expected something like that, so when the seemingly unarmed negotiator drew his stiletto sword, Hauk was already shooting fireballs from his cover.

"Perhaps slightly premature, but effective" - Old Yrseke commented two minutes later, looking down at three bodies on the ground. "You could have given him the time to properly draw his sword!" - he smirked.

"I don't believe in fighting with honour, I prefer to win myself" - grinned Hauk. "He was already attacking, technically." He went through the man's pockets retrieving a large gem and handing it to Old Yrseke. "You didn't seem to need my help though."

"Well... I didn't live to my old age by avoiding conflict" - Yrseke smiled, turning away. "Let's get back."

Hauk had the feeling that this assignment was not a job but a test. And perhaps... ah, but that would be skipping ahead!

...

"I have a proposition for you" - Hauk was approached by a man in rare Elven armour. "Please follow me so we could talk."

They entered a house nearby.

"I am Tongue" - the stranger introduced himself. "I speak for Mirage, I trust you know that name."

"I speak for the Night Mother" - echoed in Hauk's memory. Mirage was rumoured to be the head of the Underworld in Hatmandor, but no one seemed to have ever seen him. Some claimed Mirage was a woman, others claimed it wasn't one person but a group, and the Captain of the Guard would pay for any reliable information about him. His Speaker, Tongue, was a good lead, so Hauk would hear what he had to say.

"My employer offers information that you seek in exchange for your services. You will receive the information upfront, as soon as you agree. It is - ah - a gesture of good will." Tongue smiled at Hauk. "You are free to refuse - ah - at this point."

The information was about the Resistance. Hauk had taken on a job - perhaps foolishly - to recover old diaries of the Benevolent Emperor Gandohar, and for that he needed to find the head of the local Resistance group - that Captain was rumoured to be the only man who survived a trip to the tower where those diaries were kept. And the way to find the Captain was through the Underworld.

Hauk felt that refusing Tongue's offer wasn't really an option. He needed to find the Captain of the Resistance, and the way to him lead through signing up to work for Mirage. But perhaps in doing so he could also collect some information for the Guard... Did Tongue know that Hauk was a double agent? He probably did, if Mirage was as good as he was rumoured to be. "A true Nord never backs down!" - Hauk heard his Fa's voice in his head. Caution was for the Elves!

"Tell him I should be honoured" - he smiled at Tongue.

"Splendid, splendid!" - Tongue returned his smile, closing shut a gate between them. "I shall unlock this gate shortly, and provide you the information. Just after this." He looked around the room through the bars and called out: "Gentlemen, you can begin!"

Four thugs jumped out of their covers and attacked Hauk. Or at least tried to. Hauk's battle cry pushed them against the walls, and his summoned spiders kept them busy, allowing Hauk to dispatch the thugs one by one at his leisure using more conventional means. The test was over even before the spiders vanished. They crowded around their master affectionately, and Tongue had to take a step back once he unlocked the cage.

"Magnificent!" - his eyes twinkled. "Master Battlemage, the information you seek is on this scroll. We shall contact you regarding any further services." And with that he quickly left, before Hauk had a chance to complain about being subjected to a test of mettle.

...

The first job for Mirage was that of elimination. Hauk was to track down and eliminate the last surviving heir of the previous head of Underworld eliminated by Mirage some years ago.

"We have checked all his family lines and thought they were all cleared up" - Tongue was explaining to Hauk during their next meeting. "But it seems we missed one person. You need to correct this - ah - error." He looked at Hauk expectantly, fingering his sword. If Hauk were to refuse, he would have to be eliminated - he had gone past the point of no return. Hauk wondered if Tongue was thinking of the spiders.

"No problem, I'll look into it" - Hauk smiled at Tongue. "Where should I start?"

"Ah! Excellent" - Tongue's hand glided down his sword and relaxed. "Talk to Zack in Cheznaddar - he's a smith there. Gain his trust. Become his friend. Then wait and see, and we hope he'll give you a lead. We believe he is in contact with the last heir."

"I see. And Zack only lives because he can provide that lead..." Hauk nodded.

"Quite."

The two men exchanged glances of understanding.

"Anything else?" Hauk was wondering if there were any additional conditions.

"Be watchful. Agent." Yes, Mirage knew that Hauk was also working for the Captain of the Guard, and didn't seem to worry about it.

...

"Well, hello!" - Reesa greeted Hauk when he knocked on the door of her roof apartment. "Do come in, Battlemage!"

"Zack sent me" - Hauk smiled, taking in her relaxed pose on the divan. "Said you needed help."

"That depends..." Reesa stretched for some tea. "What did you have in mind?"

"Err..."

Wait, it wasn't supposed to go like that! She was supposed to say what she needed... not ask while lounging on a divan... with barely any clothes on... Ugh! This was harder than Hauk had anticipated.

Reesa was watching him with a smile on her lips.

"Lost your tongue?" Her half-opened lips allowed a glimpse of hers.

"Err..." - Hauk swallowed, his mouth dry. "Zack didn't say what you needed help with, just that you did. So you tell me."

"Well, I bet dear Uncle said more than that..." Reesa sat up which made things worse for Hauk. He was now looking at her from above. Still, he resisted.

"All right, he said you needed a friend, really. To keep you out of trouble."

Reesa laughed, arching her neck and pushing forward her chest... It was definitely harder than Hauk had anticipated! He called up a frost shield while she wasn't looking.

"Well... if you put it this way" - Reesa looked at him again smiling. He didn't care if she noticed the shield or not. It seemed she did. "There is something I need to do, and yes, I could use some help from a man who can stay cool under midday sun" - she stretched her hand touching Hauk's shield, then licking the instantly formed ice crystals off her fingers. "Impressive!" She touched Hauk's shield again, sending sparks and shivers down his spine. "We should get to know each other better... at some point."

Was he supposed to jump on her now or was that another test? Hauk didn't wonder about that, he knew now more than ever before that he had to stay away from her at all costs. She was the missing heir - he could see it now. She was also one of the most seductive women he'd ever met... not counting the Orc... and she was taking her clothes off...

Hauk looked away, not trusting himself to move. When he turned to her again, she was wearing a different set of clothes, just as revealing, but sturdier and more protective somehow. "Enchanted armour" - he thought.

"Well, I didn't take you for a modest type!" - Reesa laughed. "I am ready, let's go."

...

The job went well, and they were back at Reesa's apartment for food and drinks. Surprisingly, Reesa no longer tried to seduce Hauk - at least not until they finished their meal. Then the assault started again.

"I should be going, Reesa" - Hauk got up to leave just as Reesa lay down on the divan again. "When is your meeting with the client?"

That was the second part of the job that Reesa aimed to do - she was going to meet a "client" who wanted the precious gem they'd just stolen. And that meeting was going to be dangerous - very dangerous. Hauk could sense it under all the feminine charms that Reesa was throwing at him.

"Don't you want another drink?" - Reesa looked a little disappointed. "It's been a long day!"

"That it has" - agreed Hauk. "I could use some rest."

"Then relax with me here" - she sounded hopeful. "Where would you go otherwise?"

She had a point, even aside of her charm - Hauk didn't have a very good place to stay as most inns and taverns would rather have you drink and gamble all night than sleep in a proper bed - you couldn't even rent a proper bed anywhere. But he preferred to sleep on the floor at the Brotherhood if need be than to stay with Reesa just now.

"I have a cot at the Brotherhood, thank you."

"Thieves?"

"Warriors." Thieves? Really? Did she really think he'd sleep in the sewers?

"Of course" - she nodded, removing her top. "Are you sure?"

Oh yes, he was sure! Hauk was out the door before Reesa could say another word. She'd call for him when it was time to go see the "client", he figured. Right now he needed more ice.

15 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The road to Riverhold

"We are going in the wrong direction!" - Lena exclaimed when they saw the towers of the Wolf's Borough ahead. "This is the road to Skingrad."

"Yes" - nodded Hauk, stopping and turning his horse to face Lena. "Of course it is - it's the Gold Road. The way to Arenthia."

"Hauk!" - Lena was getting cross. "Are you teasing me? We are not going to Arenthia, are we?"

Hauk laughed. "Yes, I am teasing you" - he conceded. "You've been studying the map all evening last night, then proclaimed we'd take the Gold Road, while of course it should have been the Green Road up to the Faregyl Inn. But I decided not to argue."

Lena glared at him. "Well, I had other things on my mind last night." Their conversation about Sithis and Lena's pregnancy weighed heavily upon her. She was about to marry Lucien... while possibly carrying Hauk's child... she wasn't sure, but something was telling her it was Hauk's... Lucien's would be next... her feelings in all of this were beyond confusing, and now she'd learned that Hauk and Lucien not only had known each other for a long time - this she already knew - but also they shared a "past", something big, something they couldn't tell her about. "Something to do with the Legion and the Brotherhood" - she thought. Yet personal enough to create a bond between them... No wonder she picked the wrong road in the morning.

"Look, we don't need to go all the way back, we can just cut through the forest to the Faregyl Inn" - Hauk smiled apologetically. "Why are you so apprehensive about getting married? Lucien is the right man for you, you know that."

"I know" - Lena nodded with a sigh. "I guess I'm just..." She paused, fidgeting. "This child is yours, Hauk. And I want you to be around... I want the child to have a proper father, not to feel adopted... I..." She paused again, but Hauk was waiting for her to continue, not saying anything. "I don't want to lose you for myself either... But once I'm married, things will have to change... It's silly, I never thought Mara meant anything to me..."

Lena nudged Roach, directing her East towards the Faregyl Inn. Hauk followed.

"It's not Mara, I don't think" - Hauk said softly. "It's you moving into another stage of your life. But I'll be around, don't worry. And Lucien will not make the child feel adopted, of that I'm certain. Besides, you don't know it's mine - you can't be sure. We won't be sure for several years after the child is born."

"Oh, I think it will be pretty clear if the child is a Nord!" - Lena exclaimed hotly. "Rather than an Imperial!"

"All right, first, you can't tell one human race from another in a newborn, not until they start using their powers, you won't know. Second, even if it's a Nord, your father was a Nord, it could be his blood coming through - you know this happens often enough! You yourself are more of a Nord than a Breton, I feel at times..." He stopped talking, looking at Lena sideways. She was calming down. "You worry unnecessarily, you always do. Let things fall into place on their own."

They rode in silence for a while, moving slowly in the dense undergrowth.

"Perhaps you are right" - Lena finally agreed, relaxing. "I can't keep worrying like that, it's pointless. And we have new lands to explore. I wonder if Lucien wanted me to have a bit of a diversion with this assignment..." She bit her tongue before she could say too much about it.

"May be, but don't take it too lightly" - Hauk interjected. "Elsweyr is a troubled land, and your assignment is absolutely genuine, of that I'm sure. Even though I don't know the details - I don't have to."

Faregyl Inn appeared in the distance between the trees.

"All right, we're here" - Lena returned to practical matters. "There should be a road towards Riverhold from here somewhere. But first - lunch. We are hungry" - she put a hand on he belly, smiling. "I wonder if we can still get that wonderful potato bread here? And you need to finish that story about Reesa" - she added, getting off Roach.

Lunch could right all wrongs. Well, most of them.

Oh I just want to shout at both of them, "STOP! Think of what you're doing before you make a mistake you'll forever wish you could go back and undo."

Confusing, isn't it? Lena made a mess of things... or did she?

Yeah, she did.

"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

13 First Seed, 4E192 - Hauk's choice

"The meeting is at dawn. Come tonight" - Hauk read a note from Reesa. This was a clear invitation, and he followed it up.

...

"Glad to see you" - Reesa smiled when he knocked on her door. "I've been waiting."

Hauk entered, trying not to brush past her, although she didn't step out of the way. She shut the door after him and turned around, leaning against it.

"Anything we need to discuss by way of preparation?" - Hauk looked steadily into her eyes ignoring the other distractions. "Your note said the meeting was at dawn."

"Yes, we shall leave from here a little in advance - there may be obstacles along the way." Reesa adjusted her top, and Hauk's concentration momentarily lapsed. But he caught himself.

"The sewers?"

"Where else?" Reesa wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue, leaving her mouth slightly open.

"Mummies and rats, nothing I can't handle" - Hauk answered automatically.

"There were scorpions there recently - big ones" - Reesa arched her body. "They have such a sting in their tail."

"Taken care of already" - Hauk's eyes were wandering without his permission. Reesa was winning.

"Well, in that case..." She detached herself from the door and swayed her way past Hauk, her hips touching his in passing. "Would you like to see it now?" She turned around, her hand on the edge of her tiny skirt.

"Whaa---"

That wasn't fair. This was the worst and the most direct assault yet.

She flipped the edge of her skirt revealing the inner sides of her thighs, but nothing more.

"The Tear" - she smiled, letting go of her skirt. "The famous gem that we went to such lengths to steal. The gem that many have died trying to possess."

She took another step and bent over a chest, retrieving a cloth-wrapped parcel.

"You may unwrap it" - she smiled, offering it to Hauk.

Hauk took the parcel from her and put it on the table without looking. Then stepped towards her, gently taking her wrist.

"I would very much like to unwrap this parcel" - he smiled. "But isn't the time a bit short? We must not be late for the meeting."

"But we have all night!" - Reesa exclaimed, surprised.

"That might not be enough" - he stepped closer, now breathing into her hair. Reesa let out a moan as Hauk touched her shoulder with a tingle of sparks. He too could play that game. "Save it for later." His jacket dropped to the floor revealing his warrior's chest. Reesa gasped, stretching her hand to touch him. "Later" - he caught it gently, bringing it to his lips but brushing her fingertips against his teeth instead of a conventional kiss. "The sewers, a little before dawn" - he let go of her, picking up his jacket. "Don't be late."

...

They exchanged nods and descended into the sewers. The meeting would take place in the same domed chamber where Hauk had accompanied Old Yrseke before. They had to reach it quietly and quickly. Hauk signalled Reesa to stay back and went ahead dispatching mummies and rats as he went. The smell of burnt rotting flesh filled the tunnels.

They heard a gate being opened on the other end of the chamber just as they entered - the "client" had arrived as well. "Two men" - noted Hauk to himself, listening to their footsteps. "One old, walks with a limp. Ah." He turned to look at Reesa - she seemed tense. He gestured her to take the lead - this was her transaction, he got her there safely, but now it was her game. She nodded and straightened up.

Finally the four of them came to the centre of the room and into the light of the torches. Hauk stood a step behind Reesa, looking at Old Yrseke and Tongue smiling at them. Mirage and his Speaker. Of course.

"Do you have it?" - Mirage, or Old Yrseke, addressed Reesa. "As we agreed."

"Of course" - Reesa produced the cloth-wrapped package, unwrapped it, showing the gem to her "client", then put it away again. "Are we agreed on the terms?"

"Almost" - Mirage nodded, then looked at Hauk. "What of you, Agent? The Guard Captain will pay good money for the information on the serial killer of Hatmandor, and she stands before you. But you knew that, of course. He will pay equally well for the information on me, too. Or..." - he looked steadily at Reesa while still addressing Hauk - "...you can fulfil your contract and collect your reward. What will it be, Agent?"

Hauk took a step towards Reesa and Tongue put a hand on the hilt of his sword, but Mirage signalled Tongue to wait. Reesa turned to look at Hauk, her mouth slightly open, her hips swaying. He stood just behind her, and she could feel his breath in her hair and his hand on her hip.

"Reesa is a precious jewel indeed" - Hauk said, nibbling her ear. "And oh so desirable. What was it you said?" - he looked into her eyes as she turned her head to him. "'A gem that many have died to possess.' Now offered to me." He looked at Mirage, but the old man's face only showed a slight curiosity and a trace of amusement. "But I dislike being manipulated" - he whispered into Reesa's ear. "Wrong battlemage" - he added as his dagger found her heart.

Tongue took his hand off the hilt of his sword.

"Excellent choice" - Mirage clapped in applause as Reesa's body slid to the ground. "The gem is yours - both of them. Although I regret that you deprived me of the pleasure of killing her myself."

"My contract was to eliminate the last heir, not just to find her" - objected Hauk. "The terms are now fulfilled."

"They are indeed!" - Mirage nodded. "Basel will have your payment. As for the Guard Captain... Tell him what you will, without proof he has no case against me. And we are careful not to provide any proof."

...

Reesa's body was found by the City Guard after a tip-off, the papers in her apartment linked her to all the recent murders in Hatmandor. "Some thug finally got her - serves her right" - was the word on the street once the City Cryers told the story of sex and strife among the Underworld. Mirage retained his status quo - he was still but a mirage. There was talk of some Agent who had had his hand in all of that, but no one knew who he was exactly or who he worked for, and soon the rumours died off. Hauk made quite a name for himself as a mercenary, and some even whispered that he was the Agent, but weren't foolish enough to actually say it openly, in case it was true. But the title stuck, regardless.

15-16 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Faregyl Inn - Riverhold

"So, you killed her" - Lena summarised Hauk's story about Reesa. "Not surprising."

"She went too far with her seduction. It felt wrong" - he looked into the faces of other people having lunch at the Faregyl Inn. They were now hanging on his every word.


"But why did you never take her up on it?" - a Khajiit purred into his ear. "If it was being offered like that..."

Hauk smiled at the Khajiit but Lena answered for him: "He wanted to stay alive. She was a Black Widow."

"May be, or may be not" - Hauk turned to Lena. "We'll never know now."

"Err..." A voice started timidly at the back of the room. "Was the pay any good? What did you do with the money?"

"Oh, the pay was excellent" - Hauk grinned. "I bought a house - the largest mansion in Hatmandor." He peered to see who was asking, but that person seemed to have vanished.

...

The road to Riverhold was well laid out and clearly marked, and a few hours later Lena and Hauk stood in the strangest city imaginable.

"Wow, and I thought Riften was in the mountains, but would you look at that!" A maze of stairs and bridges covered the whole face of the mountain, which was wooded making it so much harder to find your way around.


"It's not that bad, you can see the structure from here" - Hauk was looking up too. "I see shop signs on the middle level, the Mages Guild is on the left, and that big building at the top must be the Castle." He was pointing things out to Lena.

"You've been here before!"

"No, I'm just looking at the buildings rather than at the bare-chested Khajiit" - he grinned.

Lena shot him a glance and started climbing the stairs.

...

"I am the Queen here" - an annoyed looking Khajiit in Elven armour was presiding over a large cave that served as the Castle Grand Hall. A multitude of lanterns hanging off the stalactites made it look like a starry sky. "We have a house for sale if you want it, but otherwise there's nothing going on" - she yawned.


"Umm, I wasn't looking to buy a house just now" - Lena said cautiously, looking sideways at the Queen's bodyguards with their well-toned muscular bodies. Did anyone wear shirts here?

"Then stop wasting my time!" - the Queen barked at her in a rather undignified fashion.

It was getting late and they couldn't see an inn anywhere, but the Mages Guild sign was quite prominent before them, and that's where they went.

"Welcome, Warlock!" - a mage in handsome red robes greeted Lena. "Evoker!" - she turned to Hauk. "Or do you prefer Optio?"

"You are well informed" - Hauk bowed his head gallantly, kissing her hand.

"I am the head of the Riverhold chapter" - the mage beamed at him. "It's just the three of us here but we like to keep up with the times."

"Indeed" - Hauk smiled. "I look forward to fruitful discussions."

While Hauk and the other mages were engaged in mutual pleasantries, Lena had a good look around the Guild Hall. Like many structures in Riverhold, it was carved into the rock and was really a cave made habitable with wooden flooring, rugs and tapestries and a multitude of lanterns. It felt cosy and welcoming.

"We do have a bed for visitors, but it's just a single, I'm afraid" - the mage looked at them apologetically. "There's an inn in town - two levels below us."

"That's all right" - Lena assured her, then added turning to Hauk: "You stay here, I see you are in the middle of a discussion. I'll go to the inn. I'll pick you up in the morning."

Hauk nodded and returned to his conversation - the mage was telling him about an anti-Imperial revolt in Orcrest. Lena caught some of that, making a mental note that it might have been what Hauk was sent to investigate. She however still needed to poke around for other kinds of rumours.




Lena returned to the Mages Guild around midday. Deep shadows under her eyes told of her nightly activities.

"Have you slept at all?" - Hauk asked the obvious. "Ugh, what makes this smell?"

"I see you wasted no time in finding the local den, Warlock" - the chapter head put a hand over her nose. "Would you mind stepping out into the fresh air, please? Our Guild Hall isn't big enough for this smell. And a word of warning - stay away from the plum brandy in the future, it doesn't combine with skooma very well." And with that she gently but firmly ushered Lena out.

...

"Plum brandy and skooma, eh?" - Hauk followed Lena outside. "Was it that den that we passed earlier? The one that's closed during the day?"

"A Feast Hall they call it, yes" - Lena nodded. "But I was eating, too!"

"Eating what?" - Hauk was offloading bread, cheese and fruit onto the table just outside the Mages Guild. "Cakes laced with moon sugar?"

"May be..." - Lena gratefully made herself a cheese sandwich. "They didn't have much of regular stuff."

"You don't say" - Hauk smirked, biting into an apple. "Tonight I'm coming with you!"

...

They walked around town trying to avoid jumping down from terrace to terrace, but there wasn't always a connecting staircase, and Lena was getting tired of zigzagging left and right over the mountain stream. Hauk was getting hot in his armour as well.

"Snow, we need more snow!" A Nord wasn't good with hot climes, even one born in the Cyrodilic Heartlands. "Seeing that we are not expecting any fighting here in town, I'm going to leave this armour at the Mages Guild until we're ready to leave. I'm melting!" Hauk gestured Lena to wait.

"And there isn't even a Dunmer in sight" - Lena smirked to herself, feeling rather warm in her black gear as well. "Wait, I want to change too."

...

They dropped off their battle attire at the Guild changing into much lighter clothes.

"Elsweyr is not all warm sands" - the mages smiled at them. "Up here it's mostly hot and humid jungle. But better than Black Marsh - less bugs!"

"Oh, that's better!" - Hauk sighed with relief, pulling on a shirt.

"His markings are most unusual" - one of the mages caught a glimpse of Hauk's back. "With such markings Optio does not need a shirt."

"Whaa--?" - Hauk turned to her, his shirt half on. "You mean this?" He straightened up, removing the shirt with a grin. Nords were not a common sight in Riverhold, it seemed. "As long as I don't turn into another naked Nord" - he winked, tossing the shirt into a corner.


"Very nice!" - a voice with the Imperial Isle accent exclaimed from behind him. "That's one of the better ones, and I've seen a lot of it in Skyrim." An Imperial who tried to look younger than he was walked up to them, now examining Hauk's chest. "I have a parcel for you" - he finally turned to Lena. "Black Horse Couriers at your service." He handed her a package wrapped in brown paper, and with another admiring look at Hauk, he disappeared.

The parcel contained a sand coloured robe and a note.

I thought this might be more suitable for the desert, and even Nocturnal had to agree that 'blending in' did not always equate to wearing black.

LL

"Ah, that'll be better than black" - Hauk nodded approvingly. "And the same enchantment, I see... Still no shield."

"I've got you, haven't I?" - Lena winked, putting away both robes. In town light clothes were still better. "Ready? Let's go - we've got a missing boy to find."

"Ready" - Hauk nodded, clipping on his sword. "What? There might be rats!"

In a town full of Khajiit that was unlikely, but Lena didn't argue.

17 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Riverhold - Fort Seaplace - Dune

"Just what have you done?" - asked Hauk, having followed Lena as she was being escorted to the Castle of Riverhold for a thorough search and a fine. "We are all the way back in Riverhold!"

"Yeah, I noticed!" - Lena grimaced. "And our horses were left behind at Fort Seaplace. I suppose you couldn't bring them along?"

"No, I couldn't" - Hauk shook his head. "But really... you were only on your own for one night! What have you done?"

"I picked a lock" - Lena admitted without blushing. "In full view of various people. Yeah, I know, but I didn't think they'd charge me 1550 septims in fines for it!"

"Ok, which lock?" - Hauk looked at her with suspicion. He knew that Lena disliked thieving.

"When I went to the Feast Hall the first night... I missed the closing hour" - she shuffled with her foot, there must have been something very interesting on the ground. "And basically at 6 a.m. they lock the door while everyone carries on as before. I wonder if those people ever leave at all. But I wasn't going to spend the whole day there, and I asked around, and, well... There was nothing else for it but to pick the lock."

"Well, it's not so bad then" - Hauk smiled. "And now I understand why you insisted we should leave rather early last night. But surely 3 a.m. was too early?"

They went to the Feast Hall just as it opened at 10 p.m., but it was very quiet there at the time. By midnight the atmosphere was warming up, and by 3 a.m. Lena had the hardest time to get Hauk to leave with her.


"I wasn't sure I'd be able to convince you to leave after a few more skoomas" - she winked. "And I was even less sure I'd be willing to leave myself."

"At least the Mages Guild had an extra bed - it was very good of Y'grasa to arrange that so quickly. I think she likes you" - he grinned. "The inn would have been closed at that time of night."

"Y'grasa does smile a lot" - Lena nodded. "But there's something odd about a smiling cat... can't quite put my finger on it..."

They were jogging back to Fort Seaplace unhindered by goblins, wild animals or daedra pouring out of a collapsed Oblivion gate - they had cleared them all on their first pass. They saw their horses quietly grazing near Fort Seaplace, but before they could mount, the Legion guard stopped Lena again.

"You lawbreaker! There's a bounty on you - again!"

"What?!" - Lena couldn't believe it. "But we've literally just returned from the Castle..."

"And stopped along the way to pick up some illicit skooma, have you?" - the guard looked at her sternly. "Now we have to go back to the Castle so that you could pay your new fine. And I'll have to search you again, of course" - he grinned.

"Oh..."

There was nothing else for it.

...

A couple of hours later Lena and Hauk were once again approaching Fort Seaplace where their horses were still grazing peacefully on the lush grass.

"No more fines this time" - Hauk looked at Lena sternly. "And stay away from illicit skooma!"

"But how am I supposed to know which is which?" - Lena looked at him apologetically. "It was on that bandit that we killed - the bandit that attacked us first, I might add! And I think that 700 septims is way too hefty a fine for that, too."

"Possession of illicit skooma carries a fine of 25 septims" - the guard overheard their conversation. He was getting quite friendly towards Lena. "You must have done something else to get the rest of the fine!"

"I haven't!" - Lena protested. "Or at least I have no idea what that would have been!"

"Not knowing the law is no excuse" - the guard answered automatically, although Lena thought his face showed pity.

"Hrmph" - Lena snorted. "Come on, Hauk, let's go."

"All right, but which way?" - Hauk was looking over the savannah. "The road sign back at the crossing near Riverhold pointed this way saying 'Dune', but the road ends here at the fort."

They looked out over the savannah noticing a tower in the distance and what looked like a track between the hills.


"That way" - Lena pointed in the general direction of the track. "Let's go cross-country. And let's see if there's a settlement by that tower."

...

They reached the tower in an hour or two, only to find that there was no tower there at all. The sands stretched in all directions.

"That was a mirage" - said Hauk, looking a little lost. "I've seen this in the savannah of Antaloor. You see a landmark or a building in the distance, you approach and discover there's nothing there but hot sand..."

"That is confusing" - Lena agreed. "But look - there's a village of sorts just to the North and a lovely looking manor to the South. Unless both of them are mirages as well?"

There was only one way to find out, so they tried the village first. The round houses looked welcoming, but just as they approached the outer perimeter, several tribesmen with long bows and even longer spears ran out and attacked them. More villages were brandishing their weapons just inside the fence.

"Not very friendly, are they?" - Lena turned to Hauk, summoning a clannfear for distraction and signalling him to mount the horse and retreat. They did not plan on fighting the whole village.

The tribesmen pursued them for quite a distance, but fortunately they ran into a mountain lion (or was that an Alfiq Khajiit?) and then an elephant, they killed the lion but the elephant was having none of it, and finally the tribesmen gave up and retreated to their village.

Cautiously Lena and Hauk decided to try the manor.

It was a truly beautiful house, no aggressive tribesmen to greet them, but it was locked, and they weren't about to break in. They sat in the garden by the pond for a little while, the night had fallen already and the savannah was cooling off.

"I think it is better to travel at night" - said Hauk, removing his cuirass and wringing out his shirt dripping wet with sweat. "And I can't very well go without armour with all these aggressive tribesmen around."

"You can have bound armour though" - Lena suggested, knowing full well that it wasn't a replacement for the real stuff.

"Yeah, and have it dispelled just when I need it most?" - Hauk shot her a glance: don't you start. A Legion soldier would not relinquish his armour - even if the armour itself wasn't Legion issue. "I'm used to it. It doesn't feel right without."

They chatted for a while longer, sipping mead and eating fruit from their pack, all as warm and sweaty as themselves. Yet it was a welcome relief.

"Oh look - there's a tower set against that dune" - Lena pointed over the pond. "Not too far. Shall we have a look?"

The tower was the Two Moon Temple. The priestesses and the acolytes were friendly, bestowing a blessing on both Lena and Hauk that seemed to have cleansed them as well as refreshed. It was nearly midnight, time to try and find a place to sleep - even if it would be during the day.

"Especially if it is during the day" - pointed out Hauk. "You don't want to sleep outdoors and get baked in the sun like a loaf of bread in the oven."

They continued West towards something that looked like a track or a road. And yes, it was a road! An actual road, not just a mere path! Some noises were coming from the South, so they turned there to see what it was.

"I have water!" - a Khajiit supervising a strange animal working the pump beamed at them. "I am the water keeper. You can buy water by the barrel from me!"


"Ugh, we'd need an elephant to move it though!" - said Hauk, looking over the place.

"Suit yourself" - the Khajiit shrugged. "I can give you some to drink if you are thirsty."

It was a welcome proposition which they accepted with thanks, then set off North towards Dune.

"It's not far" - the Khajiit assured them. "Just on the top of the first hill."

...

They reached Dune within the hour. It was around 3 a.m., but there were still people out and about. Dune was a walled city set between the dunes...

"Obviously, that's why it's called Dune" - Lena smiled at the guard who was explaining it to her.

"Well, no, actually, the old name for this city is Ne-Quin-Al" - he grinned, baring his fangs. Lena could never get used to those toothy feline smiles. "But now it's what we call the desert. The Khajiit know however what they mean..." He looked at Hauk with significance as if Hauk would know what the Khajiit meant. Hauk nodded.

"I studied history, yes" - he answered rather cryptically, but the Khajiit's ever growing smile showed Lena that those two knew exactly what they were talking about. And neither was about to enlighten her.

"All right, keep your secrets" - she muttered and looked around for an inn.

"The caravanserai is just down the street" - the guard pointed it out. "It's always open."

...

"Welcome, welcome, friend!" - a green-eyed Imperial greeted them in the caravanserai tavern. "You look tired - a tough day on the road? I have huts for rent, if you are interested."

"Yes, please!" - Lena beamed at him, not noticing any traces of Khajiit accent in his Cyrodilic. "Have you been here long?"

"In Dune? Not that long" - admitted the Imperial. "Inherited it from some long lost uncle who died childless, bless his soul. They say life in Elsweyr is hard, but can it be any worse than in Cyrodiil at the moment?"

Lena wasn't sure what he meant exactly, but didn't pursue the topic. People moved around for all sorts of reasons. She picked up the key to their hut and bought some food and drinks, too.

"Here, this hut has two beds in it" - Farrus the Imperial nodded at Hauk. "There's no need to sleep on the floor. Although I do apologise that the beds might be a little too small for a Nord. And that the hut is rather cramped. Well, this isn't the Imperial City." He looked a bit wistful for a moment, then caught himself. "Sleep well."

Lena thanked him, and she and Hauk left the tavern.

"He's got a story and a half" - Hauk said softly into her ear as she was fiddling with the lock. "I bet we'll meet more people with stories here."

The hut was small - Farrus didn't lie - but it was cool and it had two beds, a table and a pair of stools in it, and Lena and Hauk couldn't be more grateful for a place to lie down and not be baked in the sun like a loaf of bread in the oven.

----------------------------------

The ridiculous fines and illicit skooma come from Tales from Elsweyr Anequina. We also had all of a sudden a notification that Lena allegedly stole something from the Mages Guild and was now suspended. She did no such thing. And really, a fine of 1550 septims for an unknown crime (no, it wasn't that lock - I checked), immediately followed by a fine of 25 septims for picking up the "wrong" skooma from a bandit, and that fine then magically magnifying to 700 septims within the next few seconds... This left a rather bitter taste in the mouth, so we removed those tales from existence. The distant views however remained, and I think I'll leave them in - mirages are a nice unexpected addition!

18 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Conversations in Dune

They woke up in late morning feeling refreshed after their long roadtrip the day before.

"Let's walk around, see what's going on" - Lena smiled at Hauk. "We both need information."

The market in Dune was in full swing. High city walls were casting a lot of shadow, and everyone was thankful for it. Lena had somehow expected to see mostly Khajiit around, similar to Riverhold, but here in Dune there were all sorts of people, in fact only the guard appeared to be all-Khajiit. Well, mostly, anyway.

The clothier was a Breton (selling local garb and feeling constantly grumpy), the pottery and book merchant an Altmer (not saying much about herself, and with that saying all the more), the drinks merchant a Dunmer (selling drinks from Morrowind, naturally), the camel merchant a Redguard (importing camels all the way from Hammerfell), the butcher an Imperial (from Caldew village, slicing a goat was no different to slicing cadavers... err...), the bard an Orc (and no, Lena didn't want her armour signed, thank you!), the fortune teller... oh, they missed that one. Oh wait - the grocer was a Khajiit! Finally! And of course the publican at the caravanserai was another Imperial. They also bumped into a Nord prospector, a blind creepy woman of an undefined race (human, elf - who knew!), an Argonian complaining about the dry weather (making his scales itch), and various passers by, a few of whom were even Khajiit. It was easy to spend half a day just talking to everyone, and Lena and Hauk did just that.

In late afternoon they finally moved on, discovering the upper level of Dune with larger and more elaborate houses and very few people in the street. The posh district. A sign of the Mages Guild attracted their attention, but the door was locked - alas! They would need to ask around to see what was the matter.

Right next to the Mages Guild was a house for sale.

"Oh this is nice" - sighed Lena. "I am tempted to buy it. Assuming I had any money, that is."

"The desert does have its charm" - nodded Hauk.

"What did you do with your house in Hatmandor when you left Antaloor?" - Lena remembered Hauk mentioning that he had bought the largest mansion in Hatmandor back then.

"Well, I still own it" - he smiled. "Not that it is of any use to me at the moment. I lent it to a friend - Salah, a herbalist. He needed room to set up a good laboratory, and that house had space. Enough also for other things" - he winked. "People in the desert do know how to relax."

"Other things like what?" - Lena looked at him with suspicion.

"Well, you know - music, dancing... private entertainment. Reesa wasn't the only hostess around."

Ah. Of course. She should have guessed.

Lena shot another sideways glance at Hauk and turned into a passage leading to the Royal Palace. Dune was currently without a king, as the old king had died and his twin sons were fighting between themselves for the throne. Many people joined either one prince or the other, and so they too were fighting, or at least that was the word in the street. Pushing the gate to the Palace Courtyard, Lena heard clashing steel - fighting seemed to be in full swing. Hauk joined in without hesitation, but Lena...

"Who is who and whom are you fighting?" - she called to Hauk. It looked like guardsmen were fighting against each other.

"I just hit whoever hits me!" - shouted Hauk, visibly enjoying himself.

"Umm... That's weird" - murmured Lena, summoning a clannfear just for fun and cloacking in invisibility.

A few minutes later the fight was over with everyone on the ground, dead or knocked out. Lena hoped knocked out, because even now she could not see any difference between the guardsmen that were so fiercely fighting each other.

By the time they returned to the city, it was already evening, and whatever shops or establishments existed in the posh district, were now closed. So Lena and Hauk strolled back to the caravanserai in the market district for an evening meal and a chat with the locals.

"You have remarkable markings" - a Khajiit with a handsome jaguar pattern pointed at Hauk's tattoos. "Khajiit did not know that smooth-skins used markings. Although Khajiit understands the need, of course."

"He's not just any smooth-skin" - the Nord prospector joined in. "He's a Nord! You can tell by the pattern. A true son of Skyrim!"

Hauk grinned and Lena stifled a giggle, seeing that Hauk was born and raised in Cyrodilic Heartlands.

"The pattern is of Skyrim, yes" - Hauk nodded. "But not all Nords have tattoos - markings, as you say" - he turned to the Khajiit. "Mine are earned."

"Indeed, Khajiit knows - one must earn his stripes" - he nodded with respect, paying close attention to the pattern. He did not say anything more, just looked closely, clearly committing the pattern to memory. Hauk was going to be known in Elsweyr.

"Have you been to the Den yet?" - the Nord prospector changed the topic. He didn't seem to have any tattoos of his own, earned or otherwise.

"No, not yet" - Hauk raised a toast. "Lead the way!"

The Den was on the other side of the market, and it was mostly filled with Khajiit. There was a lot of conversation, but nothing of any great interest, just the general rumours and the speculations as to which of the twin princes would finally gain the throne.

"And how would anyone know which prince it is? Aren't they twins?" - Lena asked, playing the uninformed foreigner card.

"Well, they are twins, but Khajiit knows which is which" - a Khajiit narrowed her eyes at her. "And Breton knows that too." The grin that followed was decidedly not a smile. Lena turned to her skooma pipe, and the Khajiit snorted and turned away. The uninformed foreigner card wasn't worth playing.

...

"Well, that wasn't very informative" - Lena said to Hauk in a hushed voice when they were walking back to their hut just before dawn. "Just general talk, nothing more."

"I wouldn't dismiss it just yet" - Hauk grinned. "They say things by omission."

Hmm. Well. If they did, they told volumes. Too bad Lena couldn't read between the lines. But perhaps they'd have better luck tomorrow.

Strange how that tower disappeared like that. It belongs to Sluuroomaan the White part of the Warlock’s Tower quest. I was able to walk right up to the door. I never ran into the pickpcket Muvranna to start the quest so I never went inside the tower.

68: Who is Yen? I think this is somebody from Witcher? Because she's addressing Geralt as she says this.

Cool, they are sussing out Shimmermist Cave. Pretty sure a couple of mine have been there. Same with Irkngthand. Is that the ruins near Nightgate Inn? Heck yeah, it sure is. My memory does not fail, for once.

Exactly, there is no door. Well, there is... but I think it is quest-related.



Ha ha...

It's snowing here in Maryland, man I wish I wasn't stuck at work! I expect to get out of here soon though, play some Skyrim myself. I'll also read more Lena Wolf now that I'm not writing for a few.

Macole - I had the Tales in my load order when I was generating the LOD, so the tower is seen in the distance. But then as I started playing, I didn't like the fines, so I disabled the mod, but didn't regenerate the LOD. So the tower is still visible in the distance, but as you come closer, there's nothing there. But then again, mirages are common in the desert.

Renee - Yen appeared a few times already, most notably she was the one who saved Lena from the Sloth deamon in the Fade. Yen, or Yennefer, is a prominent sorceress and Geralt's love of twenty years. There is history there, they are both too stubborn and too strong willed... yet they are a perfect match, I feel. Yen is now making her way to Skyrim, now that she's discovered where Geralt disappeared to, but it's a long way away, and can take months and months. So if, when she finally arrives, she finds no suitable accomodation, Geralt is going to be in a whole lot of hot trouble. Oh, and by the way, shock spells are her trademark.

19 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Goblins

"This is going to take forever to sort this out!" - Lena turned to Hauk as they were sitting by the fire in yet another goblin-infested dungeon. "We've been going through these dungeons for the last day, judging by how tired I am, and we still haven't found the key to the trapdoor!"

"Well, the note did say that this maze was an experiment in teleportation. Have you noticed how you can never tell where each door leads to?" - Hauk stretched, looking and feeling tired too. "There's no telling how long it will take us to even get to the right dungeon, which of course we will not know until we find that damned key!"

"At least that mage did put an exit back to the Mages Guild from each dungeon. Shall we just go back and try again another day?"

"Yeah, let's. I could use a proper meal and a bed to sleep on."

...

They had asked around town and were directed to Zayiq Cherim on the matter of the locked Mages Guild Hall in Dune. Zayiq had the key, and Lena got it from him. Upon entering, they found the Guild Hall overrun with goblins coming from a trapdoor leading into the catacombs of Dune. That trapdoor was normally locked, keeping the Guild Hall safe and quiet, but one of the resident mages had been experimenting with teleportation portals in the catacombs, and not wishing to be locked out, he set up exits from each of the dungeons back into the Mages Guild. Trouble was, the goblins could use them too. They got into the Guild Hall, causing all sorts of mayhem, and also stealing the key to the trapdoor, undoubtedly because they liked the shiny object rather than because they knew its significance. The key was enchanted not only to lock the trapdoor, but also to disable all exits while the trapdoor was locked.

And this is why the Guild Hall was now abandoned - the goblins rendered it uninhabitable. To make it safe again, Lena and Hauk had to delve into the dungeons, find that key and lock the trapdoor. And they were not having much luck with that.

"Have you heard that story about some adventurer looking for a Dwemer puzzle box in one of the ruins in Morrowind?" - Hauk asked as they were making their way towards an exit.

"It took them forever, I bet" - smirked Lena.

"Yes, but not because the ruin was so large. It was large enough, but could have been normally explored in a couple of days. Yet it took them over a week to find the box."

"Why, what happened?" - Lena looked surprised. "Self-replicating Dwemer automatons?"

"No such thing. The box was simply well hidden. In plain sight - you walked right past it without seeing it!" - Hauk shuddered. "I just hope the history isn't going to repeat itself here with this key!"

They reached the exit ladder and climbed it back into the Mages Guild Hall.

"What the---?" - Lena cursed as they emerged from the trapdoor. "Goblins!"


The Guild Hall was a mess. They didn't feel safe to sleep there until the key was found and the trapdoor securely locked. They returned to the caravanserai for the night, what was left of it.

--------------------------

Elsweyr Mysteries is now available on Nexus.

Come to think of it, I never did give Dune a thorough walk about. I'm going to have to pay it a visit.

22 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Assassin

"What am I going to do now?" - Lena drank the last bottle of blood after her vampirism had relapsed again, for the third time in two days. "This was my last bottle."

"Perhaps we'll come across some more" - Hauk said hopefully, trying to repair the many new breaks on his armour, then giving up. "With this tin suit now broken, every wraith will slice me into strips, and you are welcome to the spoils" - he grinned.

"We need to return to town" - Lena nodded. "Wasn't this dungeon supposed to have a fixed exit in every section somewhere?"

"Yeah, and we've been trying to find one for the last two days" - Hauk pointed out. "The exits are not exactly clearly marked."

...

Having rested a bit longer, they resumed their search for an exit - they were no longer trying to find the key to the trapdoor in the Mages Guild. The catacombs also no longer housed goblins - did they cross into a different section somehow? They've been walking among the undead for the last day or more, it was hard to tell the passage of time in there.

"Wait, I remember these passages..." - Lena was walking ahead of Hauk, but now she turned around and ran back to him. "No, it can't be!"

"Can't be what?" - Hauk stopped, taking up his claymore.

"Oh, not the creatures" - Lena hurried to reassure him. "Nothing but rats ahead, that I can see. No, it's the dungeon. I feel I've been here before."

"I don't remember passing this one" - Hauk shook his head. "These catacombs are quite distinctive. Just like some passages under the Imperial City."

"Exactly!" - Lena looked at him with worry. "The architecture, the crumbling walls, even the zombies... Well, I can't be sure about the zombies, but still. Just like under the Imperial City!"

"Well, this isn't exactly surprising" - Hauk relaxed. "It was all built by the ancient Ayleids, and they have clearly reused some designs. I mean, how many ways are there to build an underground passage? There are bound to be similarities."

"May be" - Lena sighed. "Probably just my imagination."

They resumed walking and now emerged from a low sandy passage into a high ceiling structure just like under the Imperial City. The place was empty and strangely eerie.

"What, no zombies?" - Hauk took up his claymore again. "No wraiths, walking skeletons or liches? I am disappointed."

"No, there's worse" - Lena edged ahead again, her Nightingale sword at the ready. In close quarters this short sword, just a little longer than a dagger but just as light, was allowing her to manoeuvre better than a longsword would. "There's a spirit ahead" - she turned to Hauk. "I can hear him talk."

"...I go to my doom, but you..." - an echo reached them. "...the Apprentice will guide your step tonight!"

"...he gave you this?" - another voice echoed in the distance. "He trusted you with this?" - surprise and disbelief was obvious in that voice. "...Assassin!"

"...no, she will help us" - the first voice sounded again. It wasn't a conversation, although it seemed like one. "...you are the one from my dreams..."

"...they see more than average people..." - the second voice sounded incredibly sad now. "...we've failed..."

Lena stopped, rooted to the spot. The voices were echoing in the passages ahead, but not coming closer.

"What is this?" - Hauk came up behind her, speaking softly. "Who are they?"

"Emperor Uriel Septim and Baurus, his Blade bodyguard" - Lena whispered. "The last Emperor Uriel Septim."

"So the woman they are talking about..." - Hauk lowered his voice even further. "...is you?"

"Yes..." - Lena didn't move. "Over two centuries ago. Before the Crisis. Before the Brotherhood. Before vampirism. Before everything."

"Assassin? Was Baurus talking about you?"

"Yes. I was with the Emperor when the Mythic Dawn assassins sprang their trap, and although I fought them, they quickly led me away and got to the Emperor. Their skill was far superior to mine - their strategy too. Yet Baurus thought I was an assassin, judging by the way I moved, he said. It didn't make sense to me at all. I was sixteen years old, I had a rusty dagger and could throw a fireball. I was nothing. And the Emperor trusted me with the Amulet of Kings."

"Obviously, you were not nothing" - Hauk objected. "And it didn't take a Septim to see your potential - Baurus saw it too. The Blades are not just great fighters - they are trained to read people."

"Assassin..." - Lena repeated it the way Baurus spoke - without judgement. "I shuddered when he said it back then, you know. I hurried to reassure him..."

"...no, I am no assassin!" - a young woman's voice echoed ahead of them. "You are wrong! I am a... umm... anything but!"

"All right, have it your way, 'anything but'" - Baurus smiled. "We'll see. Mind the goblins now."

The echo fell silent. Lena waited a little, but the halls remained quiet. She looked at Hauk and he nodded - let's move.

A low luminous mist filled the halls of once white stone, making it impossible to see anything clearly. Hauk cast a spell, and Lena hurried to do the same - night eye.

"There's nothing here" - Hauk stood straight and spoke in his usual voice after they swept the area. "No ghosts or spirits of any kind, no undead. So where were the voices coming from? Because I heard them too."

"So it wasn't just my imagination" - nodded Lena. "And this isn't the dungeon under the Imperial City - it only looks similar. It isn't even exactly the same."

"Do you really remember it that well?" - Hauk was dubious. "It was a long time ago."

"Oh, I've been back on a few occasions" - Lena grinned. "To visit an old friend."

"An arrow through the neck, yes, I remember" - Hauk shook his head. "Not your most subtle work."

"Yeah, well, it did the trick. I lost my nerve" - Lena said defiantly. "I did better on the others."

"What others?"

"Exactly."

"But strange phenomena aside - shouldn't we try some of those doors? One of them might lead us out, you never know." Hauk had enough of this place and wanted a good meal and a proper rest out of the dungeons.

"Leave this place?" - Lena looked at him in disbelief. "Before we figured out where the voices were coming from? We may never find our way back here again!"

"And I wouldn't mind that one bit" - Hauk scowled. "I've had enough of dungeons."

"All right then, you go" - Lena turned to him, suddenly looking quite cold. "I need to stay and investigate."

"Are you sending me away?" - Hauk went pale, his eyes quite hard too.

"No, but I won't stand in your way if you wish to leave." Lena's glance wasn't hostile, it was indifferent. Hauk turned around and disappeared through the nearest door. Lena stood alone in an ancient structure of once white stone swallowed by luminous mist. "I am an assassin" - she said aloud.

22 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Assassin of old

"And do you adhere to the Creed?" - a voice with a strange accent spoke behind her. Lena spun around - there was nothing there, just the luminous mist filling the entire hall of the old underground structure beneath Dune. If that's where she still was.

"What creed?" - Lena cast around, looking for traces of a ghost, for what else could it have been? "Who are you? Show yourself!"

"I am an Assassin" - the voice replied. "Isn't it what you just said?"

"Yes. Dark Brotherhood. And you?"

"Your allegiance is unimportant as long as you follow the Creed" - the voice explained patiently. Was that a Redguard accent? No. It was no accent that Lena was familiar with. "Otherwise you are just a murderer."

"Which isn't the same thing" - Lena finished his sentence. "I know. But what creed do you speak of?"

"What Creed do you follow?" The unseen Assassin wasn't giving in. He sounded old, somehow.

"All right, I'll bite" - Lena smiled - it was a test of course, but she rather liked hearing the Assassin's voice. "Kill no one but the target. Remain unseen. Keep the Brotherhood's secrets." Lena went over the tenets in her head. "Oh, and a couple of things about not refusing contracts and obviously not harming other Brothers and Sisters."

"Spoken in a modern tongue, but still the same" - the Assassin replied with satisfaction. "Nothing is true; everything is permitted."

"We work in the shadows to serve the light" - Lena replied, not certain where the words came from. It wasn't something the Night Mother would say.

"Yes, very good, Assassin" - the voice sounded satisfied. "I am Altair, and you have my blade." An assassin in desert robes stepped forward from a dark passage and pointed at Lena's gauntlet. "And you are wearing my robes."

"I..." - Lena gasped, looking him over. He was indeed wearing exactly the same attire as she, the Desert Robe and the other pieces of the Nightingale armour that Lucien gave her when Nocturnal made her a Nightingale. And he had the same weapons. But he was an old man, although his piercing blue eyes were still incredibly clear. "I've never heard of you..." - she said with some hesitation. "But then you are not from here. What brings you to these catacombs?"

"I am from here" - objected Altair. "Just not of this time." He stood calmly, watching Lena and waiting for her to react.

"What is this place?" - she looked at him intently. "First the Emperor, now you... Are we in the Fade?"

"The Fade? A realm between worlds? Perhaps" - Altair smiled. "The real question is however, why am I here?"

"And you are asking me?" - Lena exclaimed in surprise. "I never even knew you existed until you appeared!"

"A bit hot-headed, but the Creed doesn't prohibit that" - Altair smiled. "Indeed, you should have seen me in my youth..." - he chuckled. "It's better that you didn't. What are you doing here and where is your friend?"

"Hauk? He left" - Lena blushed. "We argued. I was stubborn. And cold" - she added with regret. "I hurt him." She sighed. "But I had to stay. Hearing my own voice from my youth... Knowing all that I know now..." - she smirked. "Baurus was right - I've been an assassin all along."

"And?" - Altair prompted her to continue.

"And what? Oh, why I stayed here..." - she looked at him, his clear blue eyes fixed on hers. "What is that phrase - We work in the shadows to serve to light - where did it come from? I've never heard it before. I am not so sure that the Dark Brotherhood really serves the light."

"Does it not?" - Altair smiled. "What is life's greatest illusion?"

"Innocence, my Brother" - Lena answered automatically.

"And therein lies your answer" - Altair smiled enigmatically. "And I could keep you busy with a few more similar phrases, and perhaps I should - Al'Mualim was right that some things you simply need to discover for yourself, not everything can be taught. But some things can be... Defend yourself, Assassin!" - suddenly he jumped with an agility of a twenty year old and nicked the skin on Lena's neck with the tip of his hidden blade, landing in a dark corner of the dungeon, well out of reach of Lena's short sword.

"What?!" - she spun around. The game was on.

Altair was fast and agile, he jumped and spun out of the way, and Lena couldn't get to him even after she switched to her longsword, while he landed a few more nicks on her skin, all armed just with his hidden blade. Then the lesson stopped as suddenly as it began.

"Not bad, you can handle a sword, I give you that" - he landed in front of Lena with his arms crossed over his chest, and she sheathed her sword. "But why do you not make use of that wonderful blade in your gauntlet? Does it not work? Oh, and you still have your finger!" - he took a closer look at it.

"It works, I just move my hand out of the way like so" - she demonstrated. "I don't know how to use it in battle" - she confessed. "I only use it out of stealth."

"Out of stealth!" - Altair snorted. "Any rusty dagger would do the job out of stealth!"

...

Professional discussions and lessons can take a long time, especially when both parties take it seriously. It must have been several hours before Lena realised that she was getting light-headed from hunger.

"I've got to eat something" - she said to Altair. "What about you? Are you corporeal or are you a ghost?"

He laughed heartily at that.

"If you had managed to get to me with your blade, you would have known" - he chuckled. "I am corporeal, and hungry, too. It's good to be alive again!"

"What?!" - Lena spun around, cheese in hand. "What do you mean - again?"

"Well, obviously I had already died long ago" - said Altair, taking the cheese from her and making a sandwich. "I am not of this time - didn't I say so? And yet here I am, in the flesh again. Remarkable, isn't it?"

"To say the least!" - Lena gasped, taking the opportunity to touch Altair's hand. It felt quite solid.

"No, I am not a ghost, and I would probably even bleed were you to cut me" - he grinned. "Which you never managed."

"Yes, I know, my footwork is all wrong and all that!" - Lena glared at him, remembering her brother's tutoring. She never took any proper lessons in swordplay in her life. Unwisely so, it seemed.

"So you know it, yet you haven't done anything to correct it" - Altair looked straight at her. "Why not?"

Lena froze. "Because as long as I don't master it properly, I am not a professional... assassin" - she swallowed. "Just an adventurer who... oh boy..." - she shook her head. "And now you are here."

"Yes."

"Who sent you?"

"You did. Sent for me" - Altair brushed the crumbs off his robes. "What did you say just before I appeared?"

"I am an assassin" - Lena thought of that moment. "I heard Baurus' words from my youth - he thought I was an assassin, but I disagreed... he didn't believe me, and he was right. But it took me this long to accept it."

Altair nodded. "And what does it mean to you?"

Lena paused, thinking. "It's a responsibility. Yes, we 'just' get contracts to fulfil, and I never stopped to think about the moral side of it, just did what was asked of me... Except that one time."

"So, you broke one of your tenets - tenets designed to keep the discipline, as I see it. Why did you disobey?"

"I had to... The contract was wrong... it was a fake... Of course I didn't know it at the time, but it just felt wrong..." - Lena blushed, remembering that whole dreadful business with failed Purification two hundred years ago.

"Fine, don't tell me" - Altair smiled. "I can see it's painful. Something to do with your Brotherhood, perhaps?" - he pierced Lena with his gaze and nodded with satisfaction. "And it turned out to be the right decision, didn't it? Well done."

"Nothing is true; everything is permitted" - Lena repeated Altair's phrase. "Is that what it means?"

"It means that you must always use your own judgement" - said Altair. "No matter where your orders come from, or where you think they come from. It isn't easy, and it has consequences, what would have happened if you didn't disobey that order?" - he looked at Lena and she shuddered. "Yes. But consider also that you could have been wrong. Imagine if you were to refuse one of the other contracts that you actually had accepted. What would have happened then? Did you always get it right?"

Lena looked at him with bewilderment. "I have no idea!" - she exclaimed. She thought of a few high profile cases that she had executed, what if those people were still alive, what would have been the consequence? "But I cannot know the answer to that!" She exclaimed again, looking at Altair with worry.

He smiled and poured her another drink. "Of course not" - he raised a toast. "You have to choose, but you rarely have the information needed to make a choice. Yet you always choose something - there is no other way. And may be sometimes you get it wrong. But in our profession it means you killed an innocent person. Innocent of that accusation, anyway, not necessarily innocent of all else..."

"Yes, life's greatest illusion..." - Lena drank the wine and the wisdom dissolved in it. "But, Altair... if I may" - she said with hesitation. "Who are you, really? Who were you when you still lived the first time?"

"My name is Altair Ibn-La'Ahad and I am an Assassin" - Altair smiled. "I am not of this time - how long ago have I lived? I cannot answer that, as all time lines are now confused. My world looked different to yours, yet the desert always remains the same... You are wearing the same robes as we did, so I know our Order continued, under whatever name. Your Creed is the same, even if the wording is different. Your God has a different name... Does it really matter? Still, we are the same. I lived to be an old man, and as you see me now, I was the Master of my Order, and it seems I have some wisdom to pass on to the new generations - I have been summoned like this before. Young assassins at a crossroads doubting themselves..." - he grinned, looking at Lena. "Or perhaps not so young after all..."

"How did you know?" - Lena's favourite question jumped at the fore.

"That you aren't in your early twenties?" - he grinned again. "I have known a lot of women in their early twenties to be able to tell the difference" - he winked. "I have watched my wife change with years, and I can see the same in you, despite your youthful appearance. Besides, you are pregnant, yet not fixated on it" - he smiled, glancing at her belly that was now showing more than usual, as Lena loosened the support straps to give herself a rest. "Shouldn't you be taking it easy in your condition?" - he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

"What?! I am no invalid!!" - Lena replied hotly.

Altair laughed. "Maria all over again. What did I say?"

"Was she an assassin too?" - Lena asked, relaxing.

"As good as" - Altair nodded. "There was some... friction with my Order on that point." He looked sad and wistful somehow, and Lena didn't pursue the topic.

"So, what now?" - Lena sat back, propping herself on her elbows, visibly tired. "I am guessing you won't be coming with me?"

"Ah, no" - Altair shook his head. "I don't think I could, even if I wanted to. No, my life is done, and whatever magic allows me to appear here, is not going to carry any further. You will need to find your own way out." He gave her a long look, taking in her fatigued appearance and pale skin. "But you are in no condition to search for it, are you?" Lena shook her head. "Then we stay here a bit, rest, I am not in a hurry. In fact, I would not say no to another sandwich myself..."

They stayed in the old halls for a long while still, it must have been night time because Lena slept, and when she awoke, Altair was still there, greeting her with more food and fresh strong coffee that he brewed over the fire... "I still remember how to do that" - he smiled. But then it was time for Lena to go.

"Thank you, Altair, will I see you again?" - she asked him with hope in her voice.

"I have no idea!" - he smiled. "Take care of yourself, Assassin."

And with that he walked into the shadows and vanished.

Gathering her thoughts and trying not to panic, Lena was determined to find the one door that would lead her into the city sewers rather than into another dungeon, and after a few attempts, she found it. She was ready to kiss the sewer rat, but the rat had other ideas, and Lena had to kill it instead. She was out. But where was Hauk?

"Probably at the Caravanserai" - she thought. "He must have found a way out by now."

Hauk was drinking with the regulars, one of whom was a Nord. It seemed the two of them were entertaining the others with their Nordic humour. When Lena came in, the conversation abruptly stopped, but she did manage to catch a snap mentioning Breton women.

"Hello" - she stood right before Hauk, and he couldn't avoid looking at her. "Come with me, please" - she said softly. "To a more private place" - she added apologetically, trying to convey to Hauk that in fact she wanted to apologise, but not in front of everyone there.

"You see, what did I tell you?" - he said loudly, looking at everyone at the table in turn. "Breton women. You're never done with Breton women!" - he got up at the general laughter and applause and followed her out.

...

"I suppose I deserved that" - Lena said once they were inside the hut. "I am sorry, I hurt you back in that dungeon. I would never send you away!"

"Well, all right" - he smiled. "What happened back there?"

"I'll tell you" - she squeezed him in an embrace, and after a long kiss added: "Right after this. What was that about Breton women?"

24 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The road to Orcrest

Having spent several days in the catacombs under Dune, Lena and Hauk were eager to be on their way, and big open skies of the Elsweyr Anequina desert welcomed them and called them forth.

"Where to next?" - Hauk was enjoying the open space as they rode out of the gates of Dune. "Orcrest or straight to Corinthe? We spent too long in the catacombs, I think."

"Orcrest" - Lena was studying the map, leaving Roach to follow the road. "There doesn't seem to be a direct road to Corinthe anyway. Besides, don't you have business in Orcrest?" She winked at him, but Hauk was looking away and didn't notice.

"Whaaa--?" - he seemed a bit distracted. "Business in Orcrest? Oh, well, the anti-Imperial revolt, you mean? Yeah, I should look into that..." - he said absent-mindedly.

"Hauk!" - Lena tried to break the distraction. "What are you thinking about?"

"What? Oh, that..." - he turned to her, watching her straight posture and her rosy cheeks. "I am glad you fed before we left Dune."

"Ah... You noticed." - Lena turned to him, there was no guilt in her eyes. "I didn't relapse again, but since there was an opportunity... I took it."

"How did you do it? Without relapsing?" Hauk's eyes were probing, and Lena obliged by demonstrating that her fangs had in fact retreated. She showed her perfectly normal human teeth, and her eyes were amber, not red, she knew it.

"I nicked his vein with my dagger" - she smiled. "I cannot control my fangs, they don't come out unless I relapse. And yes, bottled blood does help, but it is no substitute for the real thing. And since the Chapel of Respite had a thrall... 'for everyone's convenience' as they put it... well... He is very well cared for, my feeding would not have harmed him!"

"Well, he's a thrall... he sleeps all the time, doesn't he? Not much of a life" - Hauk said with regret. "What is it, narcolepsy?"

"Yes. He only wakes up to eat, basically" - Lena nodded. "Did you see his tattoo?"

"The Order of Virtuous Blood. I thought they were vampire hunters?"

"They were. Or pretended to be. Some of them were, still are probably. In fact, they are still around. I wonder what they've been up to" - Lena smirked.

"You are not making any sense" - Hauk shook his head. "They are vampire hunters, and at the same time they supply thralls?"

"Yeah, funny, isn't it?" - Lena sat back in the saddle, preparing to tell a story. "It was a few months back... I was walking in the Imperial City, minding my own business, when suddenly this woman comes up to me and implores me to go to a certain address because her husband is in danger... or some such nonsense. Her husband is in danger and she stalks the first young woman she sees and implores her to help? Really, now. How much more obvious can you get? So I went to see what it was all about."

"In your usual head-first fashion, I see" - Hauk smirked.

"Well, no! I was armed" - Lena protested. "Besides, it's the Imperial City, the best guarded city in all Tamriel, the Imperial Watch stops any crime in its tracks before it is even committed, does it not?" They laughed at the well-known slogans, and Lena continued her story. "But in fact no one was trying to attack me. I was greeted by a well-fed vampire or ex-vampire who was so overfed that he didn't even realise I was an ex-vampire myself. He should have sensed it - Fenris sensed it straight away when we met in Leyawiin. But feeding too often dulls your senses. So, this fellow - Seridur was his name - welcomed me to their order of which he was the leader, stating that my reputation preceded me, and that they absolutely needed professional help with this one particularly notorious vampire, and hence they sought me out. They themselves were apparently too old and frail to fight, and all that."

"Some vampire hunters!" - Hauk laughed.

"And they weren't old and frail, either. Seridur was an Altmer, the others were a Dunmer and an Argonian, not vampires, actually, but they didn't seem to have any idea that Seridur was one. Not the brightest moths of the bunch, if you ask me."

"But what reputation of yours did he mean?" - Hauk looked at Lena with mischief. "Champion of Cyrodiil or something?"

"Well, I didn't tell him about that!" - Lena smacked his leg as she could not reach his ribs, even though in the heat of Elsweyr sun Hauk was not wearing armour. "I don't know what he was referring to, but I imagine it was my Dark Brotherhood affiliation, because he kept going on about needing professional help to kill this alleged vampire. And I kept saying that I agreed, he did need professional help... 'So you should better contact the Dark Brotherhood or Morag Tong for that, not the Mages Guild' - I said and watched the Dunmer wince. 'The Mages Guild?' - Seridur couldn't hide his astonishment. 'But you are..?' - 'Warlock of the Mages Guild, at your service' - I introduced myself, with a nice little bow too."

"Oh I wish I was there to see it!" - Hauk was howling with laughter. "The look on their faces! I can just picture that!"

"Well, if people need an assassin, they should be performing the Black Sacrament, not pulling unsuspecting young women off the street" - Lena winked. "So I said I'd look into it and left. The other two vampire hunters looked rather worried and disappointed at that point."

"Oh, I can imagine! They thought they were enlisting an assassin, but they got some snooty mage instead" - Hauk was still laughing. "So then what happened? You went to see that alleged vampire, I take it?"

"That I did, not believing for a moment that he was a vampire. So I just knocked on the door of his hut and we had a polite conversation. He accused Seridur of being a vampire, and told me some story how Seridur apparently sucked his girlfriend dry in a back alley in the Imperial City."

"He actually saw it happen?" - Hauk raised an eyebrow.

"No, he didn't. What he did see was his girlfriend in a passionate embrace with said Seridur in a back alley of the Imperial City. At which point our brave knight ran away, and his girlfriend's body was discovered later. And I don't believe for a moment that it was a vampire that killed her."

"Oh, come on. Vampires do suck dry their victims!" - Hauk protested.

"Yes, they do, on occasion. If they are exceptionally famished" - Lena confirmed. "But this is the Imperial City - it's filled with cattle! Err, mortals. Vampires there never need to go hungry and they will certainly not endanger their existence by sucking dry anyone and raising the alarm with the Imperial Watch!"

"I see your point" - Hauk nodded. "So, whether Seridur actually fed on the young lady or not, is irrelevant. And you think it was her boyfriend who killed her."

"In a fit of jealousy, yes" - Lena agreed. "Of course, I have no proof one way or the other, but I think that's what happened. Anyhow, he was no vampire, and I think Seridur wanted him dead because that fellow was walking around telling everyone that Seridur was a vampire. Remarkably, the other vampire hunters didn't believe it - the 'vampire' was accusing their illustrious leader of vampirism in order to point the finger away from himself, of course!"

"Of course" - Hauk smirked. "And it is a plausible explanation - it happens all the time. So you looked into Seridur's background then?"

"I did. With some persuasion that owner of the First Edition hinted that I should go check out the Memorial Cave."

"Now, how did he know that, I wonder?" - Hauk grinned.

"Yeah, he probably has a servant with a tattoo of the Order of Virtuous Blood in his basement somewhere" - Lena nodded. "I went to that cave, and of course it was filled with vampires. Seridur has been supplying them with everyday goods, food, and that sort of thing, and by the look of the place, they might have experimented with thralls - there were some dead bodies there, in different stages of decomposition. They looked more like necromancers than anything else."

"Necromancers?" - Hauk was surprised again. "Vampires don't usually turn to necromancy, being undead themselves and all. Sounds pretty dangerous, in case things go wrong."

"Well, may be they were necromancers before they turned? I don't know. Or may be they were trying to produce thralls that were conscious and willing, rather than sleeping all day? You know, like they have them in Skyrim" - Lena shrugged her shoulders.

"That's a different strain of vampirism though, isn't it?" - Hauk looked at her shrewdly. "And you cannot carry more than one. So unless they had Skyrim vampires among them, I don't see..." - he pondered that topic a bit, then looked at Lena again. "How do you make them sleep all day, anyway?"

"Narcolepsy? It's a disease, quite independent of vampirism" - she explained. "You can catch it without any help of vampires - some insects carry it. We just make use of it, that's all. There is no cure or treatment for it, and it prolongs the victim's life quite a bit. The only difference is that if you get it from insects, you will eventually starve, while vampires feed you, of course. It seems the insects use it for the same purpose - they feed off the blood of the narcoleptic until that person dies."

"Molag Bal really had his hand in everything!" - Hauk shuddered.

"Kynareth, I think you will find" - Lena answered with scorn. "The bugs are her creations!"

They rode in silence for a while, then Hauk prompted Lena to continue her story.

"So you found a cave full of vampires, and they were unfriendly, I take it. What about Seridur though?"

"Yes, the vampires attacked, even though I did try to talk to them..." - Lena sighed. "Some of them even sensed me, but I was not of their coven, and therefore I was a threat. Seridur apparently convinced them that being so close to the Imperial City was particularly dangerous, while of course the catacombs under the City are filled with vampires... but Seridur seemed to have omitted that fact. I feel he was using them, but I am not sure how."

"And now we'll never know" - Hauk nodded.

"Indeed. Seridur showed up as well, as hostile as can be, because obviously now I had to die..."

"You signed your death warrant already when you went to talk to that other fellow rather than kill him without question" - Hauk interjected. "Seridur was up against the wall by then."

"Yes, which is why I say again: had he not been so overfed to not sense me right from the start, none of it would have happened."

"Is that why you don't feed as often as you should?" - Hauk looked at her sideways.

"What do you mean - as often as I should?" - Lena turned red. "I am no vampire! Well, not usually, anyway."

"Oh come off it! It's me you are talking to!" - Hauk sounded slightly offended. "I've seen you in all states of dress and undress, wounded, healed, relapsed and everything! No vampire, indeed!"

"Well... you are right, of course" - Lena sighed. "I am sorry" - she smiled at him. "And I guess my last feeding makes your point - I wasn't relapsed, yet I fed. But to answer your question - I do not feed unless I absolutely have to for two reasons: first, I am still in denial, and second, I like to keep my senses. It's a habit I got into when I was a full-blown vampire: always stay a little hungry. Overfeeding makes you... mortal."

"Is that how you survived during Purification?" - Hauk asked cautiously.

"It helped. But what do you know of it?" - Lena looked suspiciously at Hauk.

"A bit more than the official version" - he admitted. "But no details. Your Brotherhood keeps its secrets well."

"We must. You already know more than most. The rest is between me and Lucien."

Hauk was a little disappointed that his fishing attempt failed, but not surprised. Lucien wouldn't tell him anything about that either. "You know I'm alive, and you know that the Brotherhood never fell. This is more than anyone should know already" - he would say and change the topic. So Hauk returned to the topic of the Order of Virtuous Blood.

"So what happened to the Order?" - he asked lightly. "After you killed Seridur?"

"The other fellow took his place" - Lena was glad to return to the story. "Pronounced me a Sister in their Order and offered me advice in vampire hunting, imagine that!" They laughed heartily at that. "Of course he has no clue that I have some experience with vampirism myself... But anyway, they pay good money for vampire dust - better than regular alchemists."

"And how many portions have you already delivered?" - Hauk asked with a grin.

"None, of course!" - Lena sounded surprised. "What do you think goes into those poisons that you like using so much?"

They kept on chatting until the towers of Orcrest came into view.

26 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Orcrest

"Are we done in Orcrest then?" - Lena turned to Hauk at breakfast.

"Are we?" - he smirked. "What time did you get back here last night? I was asleep, so it must have been pretty late - or was it in fact this morning?"

"This morning" - Lena nodded. "It was dawning already. But you were still asleep!" - she added defiantly, as if that defined night time.

"Do you want to leave today?" - Hauk squinted at her. "It's past midday, you know."

"I don't want to spend a day too long in this slum" - Lena kicked the rat that poked its nose through a hole in the wall of their rented room. "Rats everywhere!"

The look of disgust on her face made Hauk laugh.

"Well, it's the Orcs for you. Or rather, Orc soldiers. These are no nobles, their King included. And of course, the goblins feed the rats."

"Disgusting."

"Are you going to feed again before we leave?" - Hauk asked matter-of-factly.

"On whom?" - Lena grimaced. "I'm likely to catch something worse than Porphyric Hemophilia if I feed on this lot!" Hauk started to roll up his sleeve. "No!" - exclaimed Lena. "Don't even start! I am not feeding on you! Not unless I'm dying or something."

Hauk was going to object that it wasn't the first time, but in truth the situation was very different. Previously Lena was on the brink of death, but now... now it would be just additional nourishment. She drew the line at that.

"I am not a vampire" - she said defiantly. "Not a proper full-time vampire anyway. I do not need blood, not normally. I carry bottled blood for when I relapse. I only fed before we left Dune because I had relapsed several times within a short period when we were stuck in those dungeons with the undead. I was weakened by that, I could not regenerate fully even after my vampirism went back in remission. It was an exception, or I want to believe that it was. No, I am not a vampire." She repeated, sitting up straight and biting into another ham sandwich. "I just need to eat and sleep. All right, we stay here till tomorrow."

...

Orcrest was a city of Orc soldiers, and it showed. Corpses in different stages of decomposition were hanging from every tall structure, and skulls on spikes constituted the city decorations. Piles of smouldering rubble littered the place, and that was in the Oasis - the nicer part of town. Orcrest Township was where most people lived, and it was nothing short of the most disgusting slums you could imagine.

"And people say Bravil is ugly!" - Lena turned to Hauk during their first walkabout. "Bravil is nothing like this! Bah!" - she kicked another rat, sending it into a stinking pile of broken crates. The rat didn't seem to mind.

"Yeah, Bravil is squeaky clean compared to this" - Hauk flicked another rat away. "Literally and figuratively - all the drinking and pissing is hidden away, not happening right in front of you." He lifted up the hem of his robes, stepping over a puddle of vomit and turning up his nose at an Orc pissing against the wall. Right in front of them. "These robes will need to be laundered now" - he lifted up the hem a bit more. "And I can't trust anyone here not to ruin the enchantment."

"That's a good blade" - a passing Orc pointed at Lena's Nightingale sword. "Even though it isn't big enough. But I've got something bigger for you, sweetheart!" - he gave Lena a broad grin, looking her over, up and down.

"Another time perhaps" - Lena replied pleasantly, signalling Hauk to cool off. "But why that hungry look in your eyes? Is there not a whorehouse in town?"

"There is" - the Orc nodded. "Except that it's closed!" - he glared at Hauk as if it was Hauk's fault. "Locked up and all the whores gone!" - he glared again. "Admittedly, they were all pussies - the Khajiit, you know. Still, better than nothing!"

"But why did they leave?" - Lena thought it very strange that no one had taken over the brothel. After all, in a town filled with soldiers, that would have been a gold mine.

"Couldn't satisfy the demand" - the Orc grinned. "They needed a few Orc vixen there, that's what! But the vixen here would rather fight than spread their legs. And then they wonder why the Orcish race is in decline!" - he added hotly. Lena decided not to argue.

"So what does a brave fighter like yourself do for entertainment here?" - she asked sweetly. They had not spotted any obvious gambling dens or working arenas so far, the two arenas that they'd seen, just had some animals in them.

"Looking for some fun, eh?" - the Orc winked at Lena. "Well, if you don't want me bedding you, which is your loss, by the way, you could try gambling - there's a gambling den in one of these houses, I forget which one - just knock on doors, and you'll find it. Bring money - that game is rigged, I think. I always lose everything. Perhaps you can trade this Nord of yours as well - it's been a while since we had a Nord slave, although this one is a bit too old..." - he looked Hauk over, and Hauk scowled. "Yeah, forget that idea" - the Orc hastened to add. "Otherwise there isn't much to do. Beat someone up. Mind the guards though - they'll put down everyone, they don't care who started the fight."

"All right, see you around" - Lena smiled at the Orc.

"Find me any time you change your mind, sweetheart" - the Orc smiled back, baring his fangs. "I bet I've got a bigger one than your old Nord."

Hauk glared at him again, but Lena thought it was wise to move on. She pulled Hauk into a house - the door wasn't locked.

"Don't take it personally" - she glared at him now. "I needed information!"

"And got us into a minotaur den?" - Hauk scowled, summoning a daedroth, as three angry minotaurs were getting up from the ground and picking up their warhammers. "Not every house offers a friendly welcome!"

The fight was fierce, with six large individuals and Lena swinging claws and heavy weapons in a small room. Lena hit Hauk a few times by accident, he ignored it at first, then complained quite loudly, which caused the guards to show up. They joined in the fight, knocked out everyone, and left.

"Ugh, that Orc was right - the guards don't care who started the fight" - Hauk was rubbing his head. "But at least the minotaurs are dead, I think, or knocked out for longer than you and me. What were you thinking hitting me with your sword all the time?" - he glared at Lena. "You dented my armour!"

"Minotaurs' warhammers dented your armour" - Lena glared back. "I didn't hit you on purpose! It was very cramped! I was aiming at the minotaur!"

"Well, your aim is rubbish and your footwork is all over the place - that's why you keep hitting the wrong target" - Hauk took another swig of the healing potion. "You need training." Now, where did Lena hear this before?

"All right, let's go before any of these minotaur wake up" - she got up resolutely. Their excursion of the Orcrest slums continued.

...

"Fancy that - a house for sale!" - Hauk grinned at the sign in front of one of the houses. "I wonder how much they want for it?"

"Are you serious?" - Lena looked at him in disbelief. "They should be paying anyone agreeing to live here, not the other way around!"

Every turn and every alley in Orcrest Town looked the same, except for the arrangement and variety of rubble along the walls. Every alley smelled the same too, and after a while Lena and Hauk had enough of it. They found a bustling tavern and sat down for a drink.

"Ugh, what is that?" - Hauk spit out a mouthful of something called "Mazte". "This is the worst mazte I've ever tasted!"

"Well, this isn't Morrowind" - Lena wrinkled her nose at the "Tamika West Weald" in her goblet. "This is no Tamika either."

"Anyshhhing the matter with your drrrinks?" - a hiccuping Altmer stood between them. "Iffff you don't want them, lllllet me helllllp..." - he grabbed Lena's goblet and emptied it in one gulp. "Seems perfffffectly fffine to me..."

"Well, you can have it" - Lena got up to leave, with the Altmer sinking into her seat immediately. Hauk was getting up too. "At least the provisions at the Broken Jaw were edible."

...

"I need to look into the gambling den--"

"I need to check out that closed brothel--"

Lena and Hauk said in unison after dinner at the Broken Jaw inn. They each had business to attend to.

"All right, we split up" - Lena smiled. "We keep the room for a few days, meet up back here. You don't think the brothel was a real brothel, do you?" - she looked sharply at Hauk.

"A real brothel would never go out of business here" - Hauk shook his head. "Perhaps there are still clues to be found. And something tells me you are not really interested in the gambling den, either."

"Well, we passed several houses that looked even less lived in than the rest" - Lena smiled. "I need to knock on some doors."

"Or windows" - Hauk winked. "See you later." He disappeared into their room, returning shortly without his robe, but with his sword clipped to his belt. The Orc vixen jumped up to him, clicking her tongue and running her fingers over his chest tattoos. No, this Nord wasn't too old. He smiled at her and left. Lena chuckled and went about her business too.

...

"Rats and goblins everywhere!" - Lena cursed, finding nothing else of interest in any of the unlocked houses that she entered. Some had locked doors, but then the windows were open invitations. She didn't actually pick any locks, and so technically wasn't trespassing... Or it seemed to work like that in Orcrest. Then suddenly she stood in a Dark Brotherhood office, or something that looked like it. It was yet another hut, but this one was empty inside, except for one small bed, one large desk and one ordinary chair, and half a dozen Black Hand tapestries covering the walls. Even Lucien's office didn't have quite as many of them. "Someone is making a point to advertise" - she thought. A woman was sitting at the desk, not saying anything, not protesting, just looking bored. Lena said hello, and the woman replied, but didn't have anything interesting to say besides common rumours. "Strange" - Lena thought. She spotted a trapdoor in the corner and opened it, completely unhindered by the woman. "Even stranger" - Lena wondered. "It could be a trap." But she went in, regardless.

An underground tunnel led her to a Black Door.

"Is it..?" - Lena wondered, placing her hand on it. She felt nothing. "Wait... no... it's an ordinary door! There is no enchantment!" She pushed the door, and it yielded, not issuing any challenges, not acting as a Black Door should, not protecting the Sanctuary within. If indeed there was one.

"Oh, you must be an assassin from Cyrodiil!" - a woman in black robes greeted Lena somewhere down the corridor. "I've got contracts for you! I'm the last one left after this Sanctuary was purified, and then the bridge collapsed, and so I'm stuck here for ever more!" - she babbled on cheerfully, and Lena didn't believe a word of it.

"You know of me?" - Lena asked cautiously.

"You are here! And you are not from here! So you must be an assassin from Cyrodiil!" - the woman continued to babble excitedly. Lena was getting tired of it.

"All right, what was it about a contract?" - she asked, wanting to know what was going on.

"Oh yes, you need to kill this Khajiit in Senchal, you see. A bit of breaking and entering job, that one, but not a problem for you, picking locks, is it?" - the woman beamed at Lena. A Khajiit in Senchal. Sure. There would be just the one there, of course. No mistake possible. Did that woman even care? It seemed not.

"A Khajiit in Senchal, you say?" - Lena squinted at her. "Why, I already killed that one!" - she lied.

"Ooh, you are so efficient!" - the woman was in awe. "But I don't know if you fulfilled the requirements for the bonus, see, so you just get the basic pay." She handed over the money. "Ready for your next contract?" - she beamed at Lena again.

"Umm, let me think about it" - Lena pretended to be thinking it over. "I'll be back for you." Of that she was sure, somehow. Wait until Lucien hears of this...

She walked up and down the tunnel a bit more, looking at the abyss below - the tunnel just ended abruptly. If there ever was a bridge there, it wasn't clear where it would lead - Lena could not see any further tunnels on the same level. "Looks like some very old mining tunnels or something similar" - Lena mused. It definitely didn't look like there had ever been a Sanctuary there, or any other structure for that matter. And of course the woman wasn't trapped there at all - she could just return to town the same way as Lena entered. "A local mercenary group posing as us?" - she thought. "But unlikely to be behind the attacks on the Dark Brotherhood. Time to move on."

She jumped into the abyss, to the horror of the woman in black robes. Altair's leap of faith - she had to try it. What made her do it? She couldn't say, but somehow she felt she wouldn't die... Not like in Kagrenzel in Skyrim, where were it not for Hauk, she would have never resurfaced. But here she emerged in another tunnel, surrounded by more rats. "Will it never stop?!" - she cursed, slicing through them.



-----------------------------
Dark Brotherhood contracts were added by Elsweyr Pelletine. The gambling den and the brothel were inaccessible in Elsweyr Anequina. I have opened up the gambling den - it will be open for business in the next release of Elsweyr Mysteries. The game is dice and you can and will lose everything you've got in it.

69:



They head toward Ivarstead in this post, and pass by that section with hot-springs and such. Note to self: Let's see if we can find a mod which adds actual geysers. There's gotta be one, by now.



I love this feature of Skyrim. And it's something the naysayers never mention--the fact that not everybody in Skyrim attacks us.


70: Nice picture of the sleeping bear! Wow, they rode their horses right by the animal too. Interesting how Hauk keeps trying to prod Lena to go adventuring & looting, yet Lena wants to forego all the action.



Awesome! Hauk has a lot of funny one-liners lately.

Lena also drinks Nord Mead in this travel, which keeps off the cold (or gives that illusion at least). Yum. Always wondered why that brew is so much cheaper than Honningbrew or any of the other meads.

Candlehearth Hall is always welcoming, this is true. Especially since Windhelm is sooooo grey and grim.

I was playing with Survival on, and I had some mod which changed the properties of various alcoholic drinks. Nord Mead was doing far better job in keeping out the cold than anything else, even those far more expensive drinks. Don't remember which mod it was though, something that changed a lot of things, I think, I lost it later (probably because I didn't like the other changes).

Cool, I am curious what mod that was. Doesn't sound like Frostfall (which is what I use).

5/87

Interesting adventure in Orcrest. Elsweyr Pellentine has features that fit your character to a tee.

It often amazes me how everyone that plays this game see the same environment yet interprets it differently. I am pointing to how you reacted to the Order of the Virtuous Blood quest. I hope you understand that when the Jandaga says,” May our paths never cross,” he wishes you well.

Have you perhaps looked into this one, Vampires and friendly Necromancers in Orcrest - Elsweyr.

Because of the requirements I am assuming that you are using TWMP Valenwood Elsweyr. I am hoping to see how it differs from Valenwood Improved.

That quest bothered me from the very first time I played it. Now I'm just venting my frustrations.


Good point, I should install it and see, since I am making some additions to those underground passages myself. I was initially going to play without Pelletine first, so didn't have any of those extra mods loaded. But I've enabled Pelletine now, so might as well.


I have both TWMP_ValenwoodImproved and TWMP_Valenwood_Elsweyr in my load order, and it was supposed to make my game explode because they are vastly conflicting. Well, no disasters so far, but I haven't looked at Valenwood yet. TWMP_Valenwood_Elsweyr only defines land, it has no locations, people or quests. It is a very old mod from before Valenwood Improved. TWMP officially declared it deprecated, in favour of TWMP_ValenwoodImproved which is just Valenwood Improved made compatible with TWMP. But Pelletine is using this old land layout... They are working on a patch to blend it all, but it's not available yet. I was planning to get to Valenwood and look at the conflicts and see if I could make a rough patch to reconcile them, since it can be a long time before the proper patch is out.

If you look at the pictures in my map module mod, you'll see what I mean.

Vampires and Friendly Necromancers does not actually require Pelletine, but it needs cleaning with TES4Edit to remove the dependency. I installed it, it's just a dungeon beneath Orcrest with vampires and necromancers, but they are in no way friendly. Perhaps I didn't find the friendly ones. It doesn't interfere with Pelletine addition, and also not with mine (to be released later), but be warned that all the Khajiit in there have glitched tails - their skeleton meshes are wrong. Anyway, that area was meant for the Dark Brotherhood, even if it was unfinished in Anequina, so this dungeon doesn't fit with the story. I intend to carry on the DB line started by Pelletine, but taking a different twist.

I have now downloaded all the mods for Elsweyr by that author. He's got good ideas but the mods need cleaning and the various updates need merging with the originals, in my opinion (and I have merged them for my own use). But hey, we are all just stumbling in the dark here.

27 Hearthfire, 4E202 - On to Corinthe

"All right, let's get going" - Lena tried to be gentle waking up Hauk in the morning. They went to the gambling den the night before and Hauk got into a fight with the Orcs there, so now he was not only nursing bruises to his pride, but also bruises to his nose, although the Orcs didn't get off lightly either. Lena lost most of her money, that game must have been rigged.

"Whaaa--?" - Hauk turned over, wincing. "Is it morning already?"

"Come on" - Lena brought a mug of hot coffee under his nose. "There are no sweetrolls, but the cheese is passable."

...

"On to Corinthe!" - Lena nudged Roach to move, and Roach obliged. The horses seemed eager to leave too. "That's supposed to be the centre of Khajiit civilisation" - she turned to Hauk. "I wonder what it'll be like."

"Hopefully not as stormy as Orcrest" - Hauk moved uneasily. "Every day a sand storm! Bah."

"Well, it can't be any worse than Gransys" - Lena mused to herself.

"Gransys? What's that?" - Hauk caught her words.

"Oh, sorry... Some place I got to from the Shivering Isles... Sheogorath has portals, you know" - she added a bit wistfully. "Gransys is a duchy in some far away land. They had a slight dragon problem, and I got there for no reason at all. Just woke up on the beach with my heart ripped out." [1]

"What?!" - Hauk was finally awake. "Heart ripped out? What are you talking about?" He didn't believe her.

"No, really" - Lena nodded. "I had to get it back from the dragon. That was a story and a half."

"I bet!" - Hauk nudged Luna to level with Roach. "Well, I'm all ears."

"All right" - Lena grinned. "I don't know who shoved me into that portal, there was a party the day before... in Sheogorath's palace, well, my palace at the time. But the fact was that I woke up on an unfamiliar beach with a mighty headache and a hole in my chest."

"Too much felldew" - nodded Hauk.

"Or brandy" - Lena agreed. "But there I was. The head eventually cleared, but the hole remained. The people in that village seemed to know me, called me 'cousin', acted as if I was born and bred there... Strange. Well, I later figured out why that was, it had to do with the dragon. Err... with my missing heart. They told me that every fifty years or so a dragon came around, made a big splash in the sea, picked someone and ripped their heart out. That person however would not die, but would rise again, destined to fight the dragon in order to get their heart back. And so now it was me, and I became the 'arisen'."

"Did you take the place of one of the villagers who died?" - Hauk looked at her shrewdly.

"I think I fell through that portal just as the dragon was choosing his victim, but since I was not of that world, some magic must have put those false memories into everyone's heads" - Lena looked very contended with that explanation.

"That seems rather far-fetched - mass hypnosis" - Hauk looked sceptical.

"Well, what else could it be?" - Lena was defiant. "No one outside the village knew me or knew of me, and there was no trace of my previous life besides people's memories. What happened to my mother, for example? Who was she, even? No one seemed to remember."

"Yes, that is odd" - Hauk had to give in. "All right, never mind that. So you woke up with a hole in your chest, and then what?"

"Well... then the adventure started" - Lena winked. "When I was well enough to walk, a young mage stepped out of a portal and declared that he was there to follow me around and aid me in reclaiming my heart from the dragon. Well, I've heard better come-on lines than that, but I've given him extra points for making sense. He indeed stuck with me for quite a while."

"But what did he really want?" - Hauk didn't believe in the mage's intentions.

"What he said" - Lena looked surprised at it herself. "The elder of the village explained to me that these people - 'pawns', he called them - weren't really people but some sort of magical constructs destined to follow around the arisen, that is me. And indeed people in the village treated the mage with disdain, and he seemed to be used to it."

"Was he a ghost?" - Hauk was trying to get his head around it.

"No, not a ghost - he was just a man, as far as I could tell. He had a glowing mark on his hand, but other than that, he was completely human. I thought the villagers were wrong to treat him the way they did."

"Any special powers?" - Hauk wondered.

"No, nothing out of the ordinary" - Lena shook her head. "I met many others like him later, some mages, some warriors, archers, healers, all sorts - in a space between worlds called 'The Rift'".

"The Fade?" - Hauk was digesting this new information.

"I think so" - Lena nodded. "The Void, the Fade, the Rift - I think it is all one and the same thing, just called by different names."

"So then he was a spirit" - Hauk concluded.

"How many spirits do you know that have physical bodies?" - Lena grinned. "That have to eat to stay alive?"

"None" - admitted Hauk. "Draugr could be called spirits with bodies, but they definitely don't eat."

"Well, whatever they were... On the mortal plane they acted exactly the same as mortals, except that they couldn't die. Just like the daedra here - when their body was killed, the person himself was transported back to the Rift, and you could go there and fetch him again."

"That's it then - they were daedra" - decided Hauk. "All right, what happened next?"

"Next..." - Lena paused in thought. "How about lunch?" - she pointed at a campsite along the road that appeared to be unoccupied. "I could eat something fresher than the cheese that we had for breakfast."

...

"Well, now that you started that story, you have to continue" - Hauk complained once they were seated at the camp. "How did you get your heart back?"

"Oh, that's a very long story" - Lena smiled. "I spent a long time in Gransys... a few years at least, may be more."

"All right, you'll have to tell it bit by bit then" - Hauk conceded. "But skip straight to the end first - about the heart. I've not seen any scars on your chest."

"Magic" - Lena smiled. "I died."

"What?!"

"I died several times, it was completely bizarre" - Lena nodded. "I am not even sure it really happened, but I still lived through it. It was a cycle, seemingly impossible to break, yet at some point I woke up in Sheogorath's palace, with my heart back in my chest."

"So" - Hauk looked disappointed. "Then the whole thing was only a dream."

"How often do you bring things back from a dream?" - Lena smiled, playing with an amulet she used to wear under her clothes. It was shaped as a hand, and Hauk thought it stood for the Dark Brotherhood, although the shape wasn't quite right.

"You brought that with you?" - he asked with surprise. "So it isn't from the Brotherhood?"

"No" - Lena shook her head. "No, the shape is all wrong" - she looked at Hauk, and her glance said 'You should have known'. "This has the symbol the pawns in Gransys had glowing on their hand. Some said it was the same shape as the chest scar on the arisen to whom they were pledged, but that's just sheer nonsense - I met a lot of pawns and they all had the same symbol. Besides, my scar looked nothing like that."

"The amulet is shaped as a hand" - Hauk was examining the amulet closely. "With another hand in it, upside down" - he nodded. "So that's the symbol?"

"Yes, they would raise their hand in greeting, and that's when you'd see the glowing mark most clearly" - Lena placed the amulet back around her neck. "Every one the same."

"So how did you get it?" - Hauk thought there was more to it.

"It's..." - Lena blushed. "It's in memory of Scorpio" - she said pressing it to her chest. "He was my companion throughout that whole time."

"What happened to him?" - Hauk asked quietly.

"He is lost in the Rift" - Lena looked sad.

"Explain."

"Each arisen got a dedicated pawn - not the young mage who came to greet me. I had to pass a test first, then I could choose a pawn, and I picked Scorpio. If arisen were to die - which was possible, actually - his pawn would just wander the Rift on his own forever. He might get a summon from another arisen, but that would be just for a short time. They are basically discarded, but they don't die." She sat looking into the fire for a while. "We came across some of them in very sad and gloomy places, they just seemed lost.[2] I died several times - it was a cycle I spoke of - but each time that I woke up on the beach with a hole in my chest, I always managed to find Scorpio in the Rift again, and everything started all over. After some time, we already knew every step we were going to take. There didn't seem to be a way out."

"What a nightmare!" - Hauk shuddered.

"It was" - Lena nodded. "But at the same time..." - she sighed. "There was Scorpio. I could have gone forever like that."

"I see..." - Hauk said slowly, watching Lena look into the fire, shadows of memories crossing her face. "And one day you woke up on the beach but Scorpio was not to be found."

"Yeah..." - Lena nodded. "He broke the cycle for me. I took too long in the Rift looking for him, I had to leave and try again later. I tried several times, in vain. Then I had this amulet made, and when it was ready, I jumped off a cliff." She paused. "I woke up back in Sheogorath's palace. He must have known it would happen."

"Is that why you go into the Fade every time you get a chance?" - Hauk looked at her intently. "Hoping to find him?"

"Not specifically, no" - Lena looked up. "But the thought did cross my mind every time I entered the Fade. I cannot find him there, Hauk, not if he does not want to be found. The Fade is no place for mortals - we cannot navigate it. I would just perish."

"You've lived a lot longer than fifty years" - Hauk said quietly. "I imagine this wasn't your only time in another world. How many more?"

"A few more" - Lena nodded. "Time passes differently everywhere, I wouldn't know how to measure it."

They sat a while longer, looking into the fire, each lost in their respective thoughts. Thoughts about people they've loved and lost, wondering whether they'd ever meet them again after they finally die in Mundus and before their mortal souls dissolve forever in the Void.

Finally, Hauk got up and walked over to Lena, lifting her up from her seat as well.

"Come" - he said, holding her close. "Let's not get lost in the Rift while we are still standing in Mundus. We need to get to Corinthe before nightfall, if we can, I think another sand storm is coming."

They mounted their horses and rode to Corinthe without talking.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Dragon's Dogma
[2] Dark Arisen DLC

27 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Another world

"You have been very quiet ever since you told me about Scorpio" - Hauk looked at Lena at dinner. "That brought up memories, didn't it?"

"Yes, but that's not what's been keeping me quiet" - she smiled at him. "I mentioned I've been to other worlds... Well, some were less pleasant than others. I've been to worlds that were just like ours."

"Parallel universes?" - Hauk looked up. "I've read of this concept - some mages claim there are many universes exactly like ours, but they each have different events in them. I didn't think it was possible!"

"I think that's what it was" - Lena nodded. "One of Sheogorath's portals led me to a barren place filled with more portals, and they all led me back home - or so I thought, until I looked closely. Cyrodiil was the same, towns and villages, and most houses everywhere, it all was pretty much the same in each of them. In the first one - I thought I was back home - I went to my house in Bravil, only to find it locked... I asked Daenlin, but he didn't recognise me, like he'd never seen me before, said that the owner of the house next door was out of town - and it was a man! So definitely not me. I went to the Mages Guild, and the same story - no one knew me."

"That's awful!" - exclaimed Hauk. "How did you get back?"

"I thought I was stuck there for sure... but I went to the Shivering Isles portal, and it returned me into that barren space with the other portals... Trouble was, I couldn't remember which one was the way home." She shuddered and poured herself some wine.

"So... how long did you spend drifting from world to world until you found ours?" - Hauk stopped eating.

"Years..." - Lena sighed, and her face cringed in pain. "I think it was years. Very long."

"Gosh..." - Hauk took her hand. "Don't do this again. What did you see?"

"Well, it's not so much what I saw, but what I didn't see" - she smiled at him. "After a few times I was used to being a stranger, although seeing those familiar faces and getting no response from them was rather unsettling and... painful. That made me realise just how much I value my friends." She squeezed his hand.

"Yes" - Hauk nodded. "Yes, I understand. But there was something else, wasn't there?" - he looked shrewdly at her.

"Yeah... Lucien" - Lena shot him a glance and blushed. "He was... different."

"Just Lucien? Or other people too?" - Hauk's eyes narrowed. "What about me?"

"I never met you" - Lena shook her head. "We hadn't met at the time, I think you weren't even born! It was a long time ago" - she smiled at him. "No, it wasn't just Lucien who was different, I think everyone was a bit different. But Lucien hurt the most."

"Ah. Another woman?" There was no hiding from Hauk, was there?

Lena nodded. "Another woman every time. I suppose he wasn't that different after all, he is not exactly celibate here either" - she smiled. "Yet I trust him."

"And you felt like he broke your trust" - Hauk nodded. "Even though it wasn't actually the same person."

"That's the trouble" - Lena agreed. "These worlds - they looked exactly the same, the people looked, moved, spoke in the same way everywhere, it absolutely gave the impression that it was one and the same person. But they were all different."

"This must have been a very disturbing time for you" - Hauk tried to calm her down, as tears started running down her face by now.

"Y-yes" - she sobbed. "And I wasn't with the Dark Brotherhood there, or with any of the Guilds, and no one knew me... I tried talking to some of the mages about parallel worlds, but they just looked at me as if I was mad" - she didn't bother to dry her tears, as there was no end to the stream. It would stop at some point, she hoped. She felt being thrown into the depth of despair, just as she felt back then, moving from world to world, and never getting home.

...

"Is that... Wolf?" - a Khajiit turned to her table companion at the back of the room. "That sobbing Breton? Is that Wolf?"

"What?" - the other Khajiit peered to see, flicking his fingers to make his eyes adapt to the gloom inside the caravanserai. "You know, I think it might be. She's got her Nord with her, too."

"But she's crying! Sobbing like a kit. Not what you'd expect from a ruthless killer" - the first Khajiit shook her head. "Or is it an act, you think?"

"No, I don't think it's an act" - he said slowly, not taking his eyes off Lena. "She's upset about something. May be her conscience finally caught up with her."

"Don't talk rubbish" - the first one snapped. "She's a Silencer, they have no conscience. Plus, she's a vampire."

"Well, if the stories are true, she's an ex-vampire" - the second Khajiit corrected his companion. "She went through all the trouble of getting everything together for the Witch's Potion. But I hear it didn't clear all the effects completely."

"Mmm, you're right about that" - the first one nodded. "J'rama took it too, and he's still clinging to every neck he can find."

"I wonder why she's here" - the second Khajiit mused.

"Are you going to send word to the Jandaga?" - the first one raised her eyes in question.

"Yes, I suppose I should" - the second one nodded. "The Jandaga will want to know."

"That old fae is too old to fight!" - the first Khajiit's ears went flat. "He has barely enough strength to wear his armour! It's those women he keeps with him, they are doing all the fighting."

"WHAT did you say about the Jandaga?" - a Dunmer from the neighbouring table glared at the first Khajiit. "He may be five hundred tomorrow, but he can knock you out in one strike! He's an Aelf! That age puts him in his prime!"

"Which explains all the ladies" - the second Khajiit grinned. "Well said, Adryn. If he finally decides to go after Wolf, she'll stand no chance, Nord or no Nord at her side."

"I don't think Wolf will accept a direct confrontation" - the first Khajiit flicked her fingers to have a better look at Lena, who was now calming down and regaining her composure. "She is an assassin. She'll use stealth."

"Stealth!" - the Dunmer spat. "There is no honour in stealth!"

"But it prevents you from getting killed" - the second Khajiit smiled. "Some find it useful."

The Dunmer glared again, but didn't argue.

"No, she won't allow the Jandaga - or his ladies - to assault her directly. And that Nord of hers isn't just an average battlemage. He's that Optio from the war." The first Khajiit was watching Lena and Hauk as she said this.

"Optio Serck-Hanssen?" - the second Khajiit and the Dunmer exclaimed together, making Hauk turn his head.

"Sshhh, he'll hear you!" - the first Khajiit glared at her companions. "Honestly, call yourselves agents?" - she bared her teeth in disdain. "...And he had a much bigger one than either of you!" - she added quite loudly. "So yeah, it was a good night out!"

She watched Hauk out of the corner of her eye, her cat eyes allowing her to see everything quite clearly. Hauk grinned, said something to Lena and turned away.

"Phew" - the Khajiit let out a sigh of relief. "Keep your voices down!"

"If that's Serck-Hanssen" - the second Khajiit said in a much quieter tone, - "then he must have been the one our other agent met in Dune. Which explains his tattoos."

"What tattoos?" - the Dunmer tried to make out Hauk's tattoos, but firstly, Dunmer eye sight was no good in the dark, and secondly, Hauk was wearing armour.

"You can't see them now" - the second Khajiit rolled his eyes. "They are on his body, and he's suited up now. But in Dune he wasn't wearing a shirt because of the heat - Nords are not good with heat."

"I'll have to follow him around town then, the sun is just as hot here as it is in Dune" - the Dunmer nodded, making a mental note. "But if that's really he... Why is he here, should be the real question."

"The Jandaga doesn't care for politics" - the second Khajiit cut off the Dunmer. "It'll be some Imperial Legion business - the revolt in Orcrest or some such nonsense. The Jandaga had had enough of that already in High Rock and in your precious Morrowind!" - he glared at the Dunmer.

"Leave Morrowind out of it!" - the Dunmer's eyes were glowing with rage. "I'll have you know that Morrowind..."

"Stop it!" - the first Khajiit hissed quite aggressively. "This isn't the place! The Khajiit knows all he needs to know about Morrowind!" - she glared at her companions. "If the Dunmer agent wants to inform whoever it is he is working for, he should do so without hesitation" - she said quite formally, shooting a sharp glance at the Dunmer. "I'm sure the Morag Tong would like to know" - she added, using the common speak.

"If he ever sets foot in Morrowind again, he'll be in a lot of hot water" - the Dunmer said much more calmly. "And Morag Tong will be the least of his worries. He's wanted by half of Morrowind houses for what he did to their daughters."

"What?!" - both Khajiits stifled an exclamation. "Daughters?"

"Well, and wives. Mostly wives, actually" - the Dunmer grinned. "'Thief of Virtue' is what they call him in Morrowind."

"You elves are no more virtuous than the Khajiit" - the second Khajiit grinned too. "Was there anything to steal at all?"

"I was speaking figuratively" - the Dunmer smirked.

"Riiiight" - the second Khajiit's ears spiked up in surprise, then flattened out - he was being sarcastic. "Anyway, I don't think he's here for those kinds of pleasures, and what he did during the war was of a completely different nature."

"That was work" - nodded the first Khajiit. "The Khajiit are glad to not have been involved in fighting in Skyrim."

"Oh come on, he was just one man, how bad could it be?" - the Dunmer rolled his eyes. "The Legion had plenty of other operatives, I'm sure!"

"True, but none quite like him. You know what they call him in Skyrim?" - he looked at the Dunmer flatly. "The Animal."

"Why?" - the Dunmer was looking perplexed. "Don't the Nords appreciate brutality?"

"It's not brutality as such that he's known for" - the Khajiit shook his head. "The Thalmor would engage the Dark Brotherhood to go after their agents in The Animal's 'care' - it was considered the merciful thing to do. He would keep them alive for months."

"So, what was his mission then?" - the Dunmer seemed to be slow to understand, or perhaps he only wished to appear that way.

"Isn't it obvious?" - the first Khajiit smirked. "Information gathering, of course. What else would an agent do behind the enemy lines during a war? That, and subterfuge."

"Charming" - the Dunmer rolled his eyes. "I don't expect he fights with honour either."

"Which is why he and Wolf are such friends" - the first Khajiit squinted, looking at Lena and Hauk again. "Birds of a feather and all that."

...

The conversation at the back of the caravanserai quieted down, with the Dunmer turning back to his own table and taking out a quill and a small piece of parchment. He was going to send word to Morrowind - the Spy Master would like to know just whom the Legion was sending his way. What Hauk didn't tell Lena, was that he knew that his mission in Elsweyr was a test - a test of his mettle as an agent during peace time, when none of his usual techniques could be used. He needed to go to Morrowind, and the Legion agreed, just after he'd finish that survey in Elsweyr. Hauk knew he'd be watched, he'd been with the Legion long enough to know how they operated. Was he qualified for peace time work? The Dunmer agent was going to watch and see. If this was The Animal, things were more serious than he had thought...

This is great. So much fun to see an entry into other’s story. For me it makes the world seem more alive. I had hoped that others didn’t mind me mentioning their characters in my journal.

I can imagine coin being passed across the table as a bookie kept tally in the fantasy game called The Arena - A Battle of Heros.

28-29 Hearthfire, 4E202 - Corinthe

"By Akatosh, I've seen enough palaces today to last me a lifetime!" - Hauk breathed with relief when he and Lena finally left the Palace District of Corinthe to return to a more down-to-earth Market District. "How can they stand wearing all those heavy velvets in this heat?" - his voice was momentarily muffled as he pulled off his robe. "Ah, that's better!"

"Yeah, it was getting rather repetitive" - Lena nodded. "Too posh for my blood!"

The air finally started to cool under the stars of the Southern sky.

"Hungry?" - she turned to Hauk, but for once he shook his head.

"No, they put too much sugar in everything" - he put a hand to his belly. "I think I'd better skip dinner tonight."

"Well, in that case..." - Lena turned and started to climb some steps leading to the narrow alleys of the more popular part of town. "A little more sugar will be just the thing" - she winked.


It was nearing midnight when they finally emerged from Sugar Coated.

"Well, that was a friendly place!" - Hauk remarked. "I could have stayed longer, but the smell of vomit was cutting through everything after a while."

"Mmm..." - Lena made some non-commital sounds, trying not to get lost in the alleys that ran without rhyme or reason. "Yeah, it wasn't the Feast Hall of Riverhold" - she sighed with regret. "All right, let's see what other entertainment we can find."

A red lantern peaked their interest. Did this center of civilization really have a brothel? The door was unlocked, so they entered.

"I am Inga, welcome!" - a young Nord woman greeted them. "Here for a threesome or did you just want to watch?" - she addressed Lena first, which made Hauk smirk. "Oh, perhaps it is you who wanted to watch!" - she turned to Hauk with a smile. "It's all good with me. I also provide training" - she added proudly.

"All right, let's see it!" - Lena grinned.

"See what?"

"What can you teach me?"

It is remarkable how professional people can make even the most exciting topics sound dull. Lena soon got bored with the theoretical foundations of eroticism in humanoid males, and Hauk discovered things about his "zones" that he never even suspected.

"That sounds fine in theory, but can you demonstrate?" - he cut through the lesson, becoming visibly impatient. "Because I have my doubts, you see" - he grinned.

What happened next was not what he expected. Inga got up from her seat, signalling Lena and Hauk to remain seated at the table. She walked around them and stood behind Hauk's chair with a quill in her hand. Then she started drawing on his neck and shoulders.

"You see, the primary zone of preliminary erotic stimulation in males is actually in their shoulders and the base of the neck" - she drew a line along the back of Hauk's shoulders, drawing blood with her sharp quill.

"Ouch! That hurts!" - he protested, but Inga continued unperturbed.

"One must suffer for all the good things in this world, so hush" - she cut him off. "Once you've stimulated him sufficiently there - which you can tell by the angle of the neck hairs, they must be what the laymen call 'standing up' - you can then gradually move on to the secondary zone of preliminary erotic stimulation which is in their earlobes, even with the Khajiit" - she smiled at Lena and stabbed Hauk's earlobe with her quill, drawing blood again. "It is not necessary to always draw blood, but many do like it, in particular Orcs."

"But I am not an Orc!" - Hauk protested again, but Inga slapped him on the head.

"Hush!" - she stretched out his arm, pointing at his bicepse. "The bicepse is the tertiary zone of preliminary erotic stimulation that is too often overlooked." She drew another line, right across Hauk's All-Seeing Eye tattoo, making the eye bleed. "It is important to follow the correct sequence and stimulate each zone in order, not jumping the queue, so to speak. The quartiary--"

"Enough!" - Hauk bellowed, jumping up from his chair. "I don't ever want to know what you'd do with my other zones! Come on, Wolf, we are leaving! And throw all of that nonsense right out of your head!" - he stomped out the door.

"Well, he's got a bit of a temper, doesn't he?" - Inga winked at Lena. "It does work out a lot better in practice, trust me, I am a professional."

"I have no doubt!" - Lena grinned. "I too follow the same method, but without the quill."

They laughed at that, hugged, and parted.

...

"What took you so long?" - Hauk scowled as Lena came out of Inga's house. "Don't let that witch put the wrong ideas into your head!"

"Oh, I don't know" - Lena looked dubious. "I think her method has merit. We should try it out tonight."

"WHAT?!" - the look of sheer horror and outrage on Hauk's face sent Lena into a fit of laughter, followed by giggles that she couldn't suppress for days.

"I wasn't actually serious" - she managed to say through her laughter. "That caravanserai doesn't have private rooms. It's just going to be plain sleeping tonight."

It appeared that Hauk was fine with that.


"We should visit the Mages Guild, you know" - Hauk said at breakfast, looking uneasy. "See what's been going on here since the events in Cyrodiil... Traven and whatnot." He didn't sound very convincing, and Lena thought there must be another reason for him wanting to visit the Mages Guild, but didn't say anything.

"That will mean going back to the Palace District" - she grimaced.

"Yeah, well, can't be helped" - Hauk mumbled, pulling on his robe.

...

"Well met, Warlock!" - a richly dressed Imperial stopped Lena in the street.

"Do I know you?" - Lena squinted at him. "Guild mate?"

"Indeed! The Mages Guild Hall is just down that way, if you wanted to stop by" - he smiled at her with his perfect pearl-white teeth. "Your reputation precedes you."

"Oh?" - Lena started, when Hauk finally caught up with them. The Imperial threw a disdainful glance at Hauk's not-so-fresh Battlemage robes.

"Evoker" - he said with emphasis.

"Optio, if you don't mind" - Hauk replied pleasantly. "I need a word with your Arch-Mage."

At this point the Imperial proved that he was a true mage by disappearing into thin air. Lena and Hauk exchanged grins.

The Mages Guild Hall exubed wealth. It was furnished with the best quality pieces, but its most luxurious feature was empty space. In a crowded city like Corinthe where space was at the premium, wasting it like that was something only very few could afford.

The conversation in the Guild Hall was almost a word-for-word recount of the conversation in the street, with the richly dressed mages looking down on Hauk's well used robes and Lena's casual attire. The Arch-Mage spoke benevolently and didn't appear to be impressed by Hauk's rank or questions, but an attentive observer would have noticed a slight twitch in his right eye.

"Your Guild chapter is doing very well financially" - Hauk smiled, looking at the rare plants and artefacts in Arch-Mage's reception room. "Quite impressive, really. My compliments, Arch-Mage! You put the chapters in Cyrodiil to shame, without a doubt."

"Oh, we are just doing our jobs serving the people" - the Altmer answered with a slight bow. "It isn't always the easiest path to take, but that's what we must do."

They exchanged a few more pleasanteries, then Hauk signalled Lena that he got what he wanted.


"An impressive display of wealth indeed" - Lena summarised their experience looking at the spacious white stone buildings occupied by the Mages Guild right in the Palace District. "I wonder where all this wealth is coming from" - she mused, looking at Hauk.

"A good question" - he nodded. "The Arch-Mage didn't say anything, and that says a lot. And here is another place I need to visit." They were standing before one of the Imperial Offices with the red banners adorning the walls.


"Of course" - Lena smiled. "I should have known."

The Imperial Offices were only partly occupied. The Offices themselves seemed in good order, with friendly staff giving directions and everything else you would expect. Multiple copies of the History of the Empire were on offer, no one needed to remain ignorant of anything. However, the Census Office was empty, apart from the guard. Oh, the furniture was in place, but there were no papers, no books, no scrolls, nothing of any kind there, and no staff. "What's up with that?" - Lena turned to Hauk, but he prodded her to go on and into the Vaults.

The Vaults were definitely not empty. Two stern looking staff members and several guards, one of which a Captain, were pacing the brightly lit room. All doors were understandibly locked.


"Don't even think about it" - Hauk followed Lena down the stairs, seeing her peering through the bars on the gate. "They'll confiscate your Nocturnal's key, and Nocturnal won't be happy about it."

"No, I wasn't..." - Lena blushed. "Honest. I was just wondering what they were keeping under such an impressive lock since the vault appears to be empty."

"Not all that is valuable is shiny and golden" - Hauk grinned. "I think you'll find it's information. Some dusty scrolls and well-worn missives, no doubt, stashed away out of sight. So, don't get me into trouble, because I need to leave you on your own for a bit." And with that he walked away, with the Captain following.

"No, I wasn't planning on another stay in the Imperial Prison" - Lena murmured to herself. The sight of those bars brought back memories.

...

Back at the caravanserai that evening Lena was surprised to find Hauk wearing full armour. He was making notes in his book, and the whole thing looked strange. Lena sat down at the table next to him and took out a notebook of her own.


"Did you learn what you wanted to learn?" - she asked in a hushed voice.

"Some of it" - Hauk nodded.

"What's with the armour?"

"I've got work to do" - he looked up, closing his book. "I should be back in a day or two, but don't worry if I stay out longer. I'll be back eventually."

And with that he got up and left into the night.

30 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The sewers and the Palace District

At six o'clock in the morning a young woman clad in black entered The White Moon Hotel in the Palace District of Corinthe. She was met and greeted by the hostess in a white dress of the finest quality accompanied by a Khajiit of an unusually short stature.

"Welcome to the White Moon Hotel!" - the hostess smiled. "My little brother and I run the best hospitality establishment in the city." The hostess' nose twitched because the visitor in black reeked of sewers. However, it would be bad manners to turn away potential customers, especially the ones with throwing knives tucked into their boots. The short-statured Khajiit took advantage of his height and his sister's engaging conversation to have a good look at the visitor. Satisfied, he gave her a little nudge and she proceeded with her room offer. "We can offer you the best experience anywhere at all! Would you like the Jone's Room which is a beautifully appointed lodging, well worth staying in, except that it would make you miss out on the luxury of the Jone's Suite which comes complete with dinner! What will it be? Oh, it's 50 septims for the room and 110 septims for the suite, per night. I mere trifle for a lady of your... err... profession." She twitched. "You may stay with us as long as you want!" - she added with a big smile.

Lena was listening to this tirade with a little smirk on her face, thinking to herself: "Oh yes, I'm sure you'd love to have me staying with you for a whole week, at 110 septims a night! Good grief, woman!" But she'd been up all night going through the sewers under Corinthe, and she could use a dinner and a bed - she intended to sleep all day and be out and about again in the evening. Perhaps this house of splendour even had a bath. So she smiled politely and paid for the Jone's Suite.

"Wonderful!" - the hostess beamed. "I am sure you will be most comfortable! My brother has got everything ready, you'll find your dinner served in the room. It's up the stairs, the door on your left."

Up the stairs on the landing there were three doors, and Lena dutifully opened the door on the left. The room was quite nice, but not exactly a suite, the table was indeed already set ("How long for?" - Lena wondered), and there was someone already at dinner...

"Oh, pardon me!" - exclaimed Lena, thinking that she got the wrong room.

"Well met, Guild mate!" - the richly dressed (what else?) Altmer at the table greeted her. "Please, join me." The table was indeed set for two.

"Err..." - Lena stumbled, she didn't really want company. Was that the extra luxury of the Jone's Suite? Was that Jone? There was just the one double bed in the room, she noticed. "I'll be back shortly" - she offered and stepped out onto the landing again. "I'm sure she said the door on the left" - she thought. "Hmm... What about these other two doors?"

The door on the right was locked, but the door in the middle wasn't. Lena entered. This room looked a lot more like a suite - it was at least double the size of the other one. However, all cupboards were empty and there was no dinner on the table. Lena tried the bed - it seemed nice, she could sleep here. "Oh sod it!" - she swore, really not wanting to go back to Jone next door, or whatever his name was. She got some food out of her pack, ate what she had and fell into the bed, exhausted. She'd take it up with the management in the morning... err... evening... whenever she woke up...

...

After Hauk left the previous evening, Lena decided to use the time on her own to investigate the less prominent sites of Corinthe, starting with the sewers. One might say that going there alone could be too dangerous, but she hadn't heard of a daedric incursion or a zombie plague, and figured that any vampires or necromancers would be keeping to their lairs. Besides, she had Dessos, the dremora in the service of Sanguine - he made Kynval by now and was eager to prove he deserved it. She'd be fine.

As it turned out, she didn't need Dessos - she could deal with rats on her own. There was nothing else down in the sewers! "How strange" - Lena thought, not finding anything of interest. "Oh wait, here's a door. Sewer lowlife, by the looks of it." Indeed, the hideout housed some bandits. Six in all, and after summoning a few clannfears, Lena called up Dessos.

"Fall on your sword!" - he roared, not bothered by the fact that the bandits were mostly armed with axes. It didn't matter though - they fell on their axes instead. "All finished" - he turned to Lena in a few minutes. "Anything else?"

"No, thank you" - she smiled. "There's nothing but rats here otherwise."

"And these were rats also" - he smiled back. "See you later."

"Give my love to Sanguine" - she waved and dispelled him.

She cleared the hideout of all valuables (not much) and fresh food (better not let it go to waste), and continued her exploration of the sewers. On the opposite end of the system she found another door, with open coffins in the water in front of it and cold emanating from the whole wall. "Vampires" - she thought. "Leave them be." If there was nothing else to do in Corinthe, she would return there with Hauk.

And so after a long and mostly fruitless dreg through the sewers, she emerged in the Palace District right in front of the White Moon Hotel and decided that rest was what she needed most. The 110 septim fee for the luxurious room was being paid by the bandits.

...

Lena woke up in late afternoon. There was still no food served in her luxurious suite, and the dining room downstairs was equally empty. There was also no one to be seen at the reception. "Well, so much for the best stay ever" - Lena thought with annoyance but didn't want to waste any time chasing after them. She wouldn't be staying at that hotel again, of that she was certain.

Feeling bored, she returned to the sewers to have a look at the vampire lair - just have a look, not slay everyone in sight, as that would be too difficult to do alone. And why would she, anyway. The lair was locked, they clearly didn't wish to be disturbed.

Yes, those were vampires, quite a substantial group of them. They had a comfortable dungeon under Corinthe with the door quite close to the sewer exit into the Palace District. "I suppose they have no need of a thrall" - Lena smirked. She went through all the rooms, occasionally throwing Nocturnal's Subterfuge spell at the vampires to keep them busy fighting each other while she had a good look around. A vampire coven. Nothing special. Every city had them. "These seem to be mostly nobles" - she noted from their attire and the furniture in the rooms. "Still like their comforts. Perhaps they are even locals. Leave them be." She left, while the vampires were still fighting.

The last thing to investigate in this city were the two abandoned houses that Lena spotted earlier. The doors were barred, but perhaps the windows offered access. The first one was positioned conveniently by a staircase - it was occupied by beggars. The second was a bit more troublesome, the window was quite high. Eventually Lena climbed in. A ghost of a woman was sitting at the table in a room with overturned furniture. "My babies are crying" - she said. Lena heard noises coming from above.

Jumping over some crates, she scaled the stairs to the upper floor, it must have been the bedroom. There was a skeleton on the bed and four or five little ghosts floating around. It was all too clear what had occurred.

The fight with the ghosts wasn't difficult, yet their spells triggered Lena's vampirism, and that was the bigger problem. She needed blood. She lay on the bed next to the skeleton to gather her strength, even spoke to the ghost of the woman again, but the ghost had nothing more to say. How did she die? The place wasn't rich, perhaps it was disease or starvation. In a city full of riches some people would still starve to death.


"Well, there's only one thing for it" - Lena decided, feeling the familiar powers curse through her veins. "And I am not wasting bottled blood on this."

In the dead of night she walked through Corinthe. Some passers by reflected on the paleness of her visage. Some blamed the lighting, some suggested she should see a healer. "No, it is much too late for that" - she thought to herself. The mages at the Corinthe chapter of the Guild were rich, not only in clothing, but also in their diet. "Better them than some poor sods sleeping rough" - she reflected, entering the Residence Hall. No one heard her, no one woke up. Someone had faint bite marks on the neck in the morning.

Lena returned to the White Moon Hotel to catch some much needed sleep in the room that was still hers. She'd be right as rain again when she woke.

Ah, the nights spent at The White Moon Hotel. We remember Bhirshasa and her little brother Buz. IIRC Bhirshasa is an Ohmes while Buz could be either a Dagi or a Dagi-raht.

Interesting how they determine the per-night rate.

Compared to some London hotels, they are being overly logical. A decent room for 50 septims, a room double in size for 110 septims. In London I've had options of a tiny room for £110 versus exactly the same room with a piece of toast for breakfast for £198, because we want to remain under £200. That was one expensive piece of toast! But the room was labelled "executive" because of that.

30 Hearthfire, 4E202 - The hot sun of Elsweyr

Hauk preferred to travel at night. The sun in Elsweyr was hot enough to melt his armour while he was wearing it, or that's how it felt. He regretted not having the enchanted robes he got in Antaloor - there too the sun was very hot. But an agent must do what an agent must do, whatever the weather.

Peace and opulence of Corinthe jarred badly with decomposing bodies in Orcrest, he felt, especially since the Pshara kept squabbling and did little to actually govern the city. Even though the presence of the Imperial Offices and the Imperial Legion accounted for some measure of tranquillity, the calm still felt enforced. But by whom? Hauk had to find out. The Captain of the Imperial Guard had some suspicions but couldn't leave town, which is where Hauk came in.

"Worshipping the Moons is weird" - Hauk thought, patting Luna and letting her relax into a quiet trot. "Why worship a celestial body? Even if it does determine their breeds - it does so reliably and every time the same, that's just nature, not any kind of a deity."

A ruined fort appeared in the distance, nearly swallowed by the sands. Hauk shifted in the saddle, his whole body straightening up - he sensed danger.

The fort presented several layers of defences. A Khajiit tribal village could be seen nearby, and that tribe clearly considered the fort to be their property. It took a while for Hauk to convince them otherwise, but after half a dozen warriors lay dead, the mages retreated into their huts, declaring ceasefire. Hauk was annoyed and wanted to chase after them, but they weren't what he came there for, so he left it for later and proceeded into the fort.

On the inside the fort was definitely not Khajiit property. A group of particularly aggressive necromancers were calling it home, and it took Hauk the rest of the night and the better part of the morning to clear them out. "Blast those zombies, they are too hard to kill" - he cursed, chewing on mandrake root again. Astral Vapours was a bane for mages as it stunted one's magicka flow, and every zombie there seemed to carry the disease. Finally feeling the familiar tingling of magicka in his fingertips, he spat out the rest of the bitter root and looked around for a place to rest before continuing on.

"One thing I'll say for necromancers" - he grinned, discovering their dining area, - "they do have good mead!"

He stretched out by the fire for a couple of hours to catch some sleep, but didn't eat anything - the heat seemed to make him lose his appetite. "There will be time for that later" - he told himself, getting up.

The furthest chamber of the fort appeared to be a dead end. With the ease of a long-standing habit, Hauk ran his hand along the embossed relief, found a hidden button, pushed it and saw the entire wall swing open revealing a passage beyond. A smell of fresh blood and old rotten flesh came rushing at him. "Ugh" - he grimaced. "But at least I'm in the right place."

Closing the door behind him, he descended into a system of caverns that seemed to house more skeletons than the necromancers had above them, except that the skeletons here were not animated. Each crevice was fenced off with prison bars - there was no where to run, and the skeletons weren't attempting it. A few iron maidens and stretching racks were placed around the room, chains were hanging off the walls in abundance.

Hauk walked from one cavern to the next, with the smell of fresh blood getting stronger as he went. Fresh blood stains started to appear, too. Moans were coming from the space ahead.

"Oh, there you are!" - Hauk greeted an Altmer sitting at a desk in the middle of a large cavern lined with prison cells. "I thought I'd find you here, Healer!"

"Animal!" - the Altmer looked up. "Welcome! Troubles again?" - he looked half-joking, half-concerned.

"Yeah, well, you know, the usual, some people just don't know where to stop" - Hauk grinned. "Any news?"

"None" - the Healer shook his head. "These ones won't talk or don't know anything, I can't figure out" - he jerked his head towards the prison cells - some of the prisoners were still alive.

"The Captain mentioned you could use some assistance" - Hauk grinned. "Are they..?"

"Picked up near the Oblivion gate where that unit was slaughtered" - the Altmer looked sad. "Those were good men. And they were not killed by the daedra!" He glared at the prisoners.

"Sword wounds?" - Hauk's eyes went hard.

"Swords and spears, mostly of a local make" - the Altmer nodded. "The same as what they carried" - he pointed at a heap of weapons in the corner.

"That doesn't prove anything though" - Hauk objected. "Everyone here carries this stuff. Did they say anything at all?" He walked over to the cells, peering through the bars. Some prisoners were listening in and looked back, others either didn't care or were already dead.

"They spit a lot" - the Altmer grimaced. "But this is not exactly my line of work..."

"No, Healer" - Hauk smiled and started removing his armour. "I've seen the equipment in the front rooms - have you got the elixirs ready?" The Altmer nodded. "Good, then let's not waste any time. We'll start with this one" - he pointed at a Bosmer cowering at the back of his cell. "Hello, darling! Starting to shake already? Tszt-tszt!"

"He hasn't had his sugar for two days now" - the Altmer unlocked the cell. "He's ready."

"No, it isn't the lack of sugar that makes him shake" - Hauk picked up the prisoner's chains, prodding the Bosmer to move. "Have you seen his eyes? He isn't a Bosmer."

"An Ohmes?" - the Altmer brought a torch close to the prisoner's face which made him cringe. "By the Nine, you are right! I feel foolish not to have noticed..." - he sighed. "I used all the wrong elixirs on him, no wonder he..."

"Which is why I prefer more universal methods" - Hauk nodded, lifting up the prisoner by the chains and fixing them to the ceiling. "Start from the ankles, then move up. Even the hardiest ones give up when we get to the groin. Tourniquet" - he stretched his hand and the Altmer handed him a piece of frayed rope. "Mmm, not the greatest, but it will do. Knife."

A trickle of yellow liquid ran down the prisoner's leg, some of it got on Hauk's hand.

"Remember me, do you?" - he stood up, shaking the liquid off his hand. "I said I'd find you eventually. So, what secrets do you have for me today?"

...

"Do you want him alive?" - the Altmer's hand hovered over a selection of vials. "Or are we done?"

"Alive" - nodded Hauk. "We'll take him back to the cell and he can tell the others all about his experience." He stood back and allowed the Altmer to inject the elixir into the prisoner's thigh. "He still has his feet, and perhaps he can convince the rest that they want to keep theirs too."

"He can't walk though" - the Altmer shook his head. "The Khajiit need their toes, even the Ohmes."

"I know" - Hauk grinned, hoisting the prisoner across his shoulder. "But I didn't cut all of them off. He'll adapt, eventually. He's done it before."

...

"It's been a while, Healer" - Hauk turned to the Altmer when they were sitting comfortably by the fire in a separate cavern. "Been keeping busy?"

"Oh, there's always work for someone like me" - the Altmer smiled, refilling his goblet. "Poisons and potions are ever in demand. But the Legion takes their dues, and I could not refuse when they called me here. Even though they really needed someone like you."

"I'm here now" - Hauk winked. "The Legion didn't take these attacks seriously at first, they thought simple alchemical stimulation would make these people talk. It works in everyday life, you know."

"Yeah, it's no longer everyday life, is it" - the Altmer clicked his tongue. "Reminds me of the Oblivion Crisis. We never had a lot of gates here in Elsweyr, the bandits and other lowlife overran these lands, not the daedra. And with the Legion being stretched thin..."

They sat looking into the fire, the Altmer thinking of the events two hundred years ago, Hauk thinking of much more recent events during the Great War.

"The Legion is stretched thin now again" - he noted. "There's unrest brewing, and the Elder Council is paralysed with fear" - he grimaced. "I'm off to Morrowind after this."

"Morrowind?" - the Altmer raised an eyebrow. "The Spy Master called?"

"Well, I never met the Spy Master personally" - Hauk opened another bottle of mead. "I hear he has a sugar problem?" - he grinned.

"That he does" - the Altmer nodded. "Which opens so many doors for him, you wouldn't believe. He's spending a lot of time in Riften now, too."

"Just over the border" - Hauk mused. "Of Cyrodiil, as well as Morrowind. Interesting."

That sat drinking in silence for a while.

"But he must be a very old man now" - Hauk said quietly. "Didn't he serve during the Morrowind Crisis already?"

"And he wasn't a young man then either" - the Altmer nodded. "That sugar is not just sugar, you know. But you didn't hear that from me."

Two old friends sat down for dinner. Nothing unusual about that.

4 Frostfall, 4E202 - The last day in Corinthe

Hauk returned to Corinthe just after dawn and found Lena missing. "Typical" - he thought to himself. "Leave her alone for a couple of days, and she'll be off all night exploring gods know what, most likely beneath the city." He was just about to pay for accommodation at the caravanserai, when the host assured him that the bed had been paid for a week in advance.

"Assuming you still want to share with her?" - he twitched his nose. "I haven't changed the sheets."

The bed wasn't the freshest, and Hauk thought he could smell death and sewers on it, but it was nothing like where he spent the last couple of days. He lay down and fell asleep immediately.

"Hrmph" - the host smirked to himself, poking his head into the common room. "They must be who people say they are."

...

Lena returned to the caravanserai just before midday, tired and ready for bed. She nodded to the host and went straight upstairs, pulling off her weapon belt going up. Hauk was still asleep, he looked tired and smelled of blood and poisons. Lena smiled, removed her boots and gauntlets and got into bed next to him. They'd need to find a bath house in the morning... err... whenever it was that they woke up.

...

Lena didn't sleep very long, just a few hours. She woke up to loud noises downstairs and poked her head to see what was going on.

"And I am telling you - he is an Imperial agent!" - a scruffy Khajiit was gesticulating wildly, pointing at Hauk. "A spy! A lowlife!"

"Well, now, contain yourself, J'rama" - the host was trying to calm him down, while Hauk was just standing there with a little smile on his face, clearly amused by the situation. "You can't just accuse every Nord of being an agent!"

"He's not just any Nord!" - J'rama grew more agitated still. "Can't you smell it? The blood!"

"Blood, eh?" - the host narrowed his eyes. "You should go back to that witch and ask for a refund!"

"So, my senses are better than yours!" - J'rama glared at him. "Call yourself a Khajiit! Ohmes are Bosmer!" - he spat.

Wow, that was the wrong thing to say. The host was at J'rama's throat in no time, and they tumbled on the ground, each trying to pin the other one down.

"What's it all about this time?" - a sleepy Redguard woman emerged from behind the screens. "They are always at each other's throats."

"Apparently I am an Imperial spy" - Hauk grinned at her.

"Oh, and are you?" - the Redguard winked. "Don't answer that. You are what you are and I'm not asking." She turned around and went back to sleep. This was another person who preferred to be active at night.

Lena pulled on her city clothes, picked up Hauk's robe and went downstairs.

"Here" - she pressed it against his chest. "Let's go. We have things to do." She went out, and Hauk followed.

"Where are we going?" - Hauk caught up with Lena who was walking briskly towards the gates leading into the Palace District.

"The Mages Guild" - she threw over her shoulder. "I have something for the Arch Mage."

"What have you been up to while I was away?" - Hauk stopped her. "Tell me first."

Lena sighed. "Oh, all right, I suppose it's for the best. Follow me." She turned into a side alley and held open a trapdoor. The sewers.

"So?" - Hauk asked impatiently once they descended.

"We can talk here" - Lena leaned against the wall. "A few things happened while you were away..."

...

"Wow, that explains a lot!" - Hauk whistled, looking through the book that Lena held before him. "I wonder what he's got to say about that!"

...

The business with the Arch Mage was concluded to Lena's and Hauk's satisfaction. It had no bearing on their respective assignments though, and Hauk disappeared into the Imperial Offices again to talk to the Captain. Lena was aimlessly strolling around waiting for him.

"Hello" - Raevus Palenix approached her with a smile. "That was quite a storm you raised at the Guild. Your reputation is well deserved, I see."

"Well, I just can't help it sometimes" - Lena smiled back at this attractive young Imperial. He reminded her of someone... "So, you're still talking to me, then?"

"Oh, I have no love for this establishment" - he scowled. "Can I come with you?"

"Come with me where?" - Lena was taken aback.

"Wherever you are going!" - Raevus beamed at her.

Lena looked over his rich clothing and his handsome, well-groomed appearance and shook her head with doubt.

"Do you actually know what you are asking?" - she asked, trying to sound friendly. "Do you know what I do? Where I spend my time? Whom I frequent?"

"I do, actually, Sister" - he smiled, pulling out an amulet from under the collar of his tunic. The Cruelty's Heart.

"Well, in that case, surely you don't need to stay with them" - she looked in the direction of the Mages Guild. "Unless there is a problem?"

"Yes, well, there is" - Raevus admitted. "I wondered if you could put in a good word for me... seeing how I gave you a hint?" He looked hopeful.

"What is the problem?" - Lena looked stern.

"I... well... killed someone I shouldn't have" - he sighed.

"It's a sin, but they would not have kicked you out for this" - Lena shook her head. "Continue."

"Gosh, you are a Silencer" - he looked at her in awe. "And I stole some scrolls."

"And?"

"And... what, is this not enough?"

"What else have you done?" This was clearly the last warning, and Raevus melted before her.

"Nothing else, but I've done it several times... I've fought the wraith, I'm not worried about that... I just want to be accepted back" - he pleaded with her.

"Well, it's not up to me, is it" - Lena was cold as ice. "Your Speaker will make his decision. Oh, he already has? Well then, it's out of my hands. I didn't realise we allowed Brothers to quit."

"We don't" - Reavus went pale. "Which is why I need to leave."

The further this conversation progressed, the more Lena was perplexed by it. Was any of it true? She couldn't decide. And why would she want to help this fellow, if he was breaking tenets left and right? Yet something about him was intriguing. Lucien had warned her not to reveal her membership with the Brotherhood to anyone, but this fellow already knew it... she wondered how he knew, who he was really... and was that amulet actually his or did he steal it too? Steal it or worse...

"So what you are really asking for is protection" - Lena was looking down at him. "I am no bodyguard."

"No, I was foolish to ask..." - he looked dejected and turned to leave, nearly bumping into Hauk.

"What's the matter?" - Hauk stopped him.

"Optio" - Raevus smiled with sadness and walked away.

Hauk looked at Lena with a question in his eyes.

"He says he broke the tenets several times and they kicked him out" - she offered, still looking at Raevus standing by the pool. "He's got the Cruelty's Heart, and if it's his, he is not a novice. We do not allow people above novices to quit, and he seems to be afraid for his life - he wanted to come with me!" - she smirked. "He knew my rank which is strange..."

"So you said no" - Hauk too was looking at Raevus. "There's more to him than meets the eye."

Lena nodded - she made up her mind, throwing caution to the wind, as usual. She walked over to Raevus.

"Go to Orcrest" - she spoke and his face lit up. "Find the Brotherhood Crypt, say your prayers. Who knows. Mind the local mercenaries - I think there's an imposter group. I don't know how to find the Sanctuary there. Survive. I'll be back for you, then we'll see."

"Orcrest..." - he smirked. "You are sending an Imperial to Orcrest!"

"Well, you survived the wraith that was set onto you, and you so far evaded the assassins, so you must have some skills. Improvise. This is not an absolution, Brother."

This offer was final, and Raevus bowed his head.

"I shall wait for you in Orcrest, Silencer - find me in the Crypt."

...

"So, what else have you been up to? Surely, that wasn't all" - Hauk was stretching in a full-size bath tub, scrubbing away the grime of the last few days. Lena was blowing bubbles in another tub - they finally found the bath house.

"What do you mean - surely it wasn't all?" - she looked at him quite innocently. "I thought that was plenty!"

"Oh come on, I know you!" - Hauk laughed. "There's a hole of 36 hours in your story."

"Well, I..." - Lena laughed awkwardly. "I got arrested."

Hauk's bellowing laugh sounded through the whole of Market District, if not further. Some heads turned, shook and sniggered.

"I... might have wanted to see what their dungeons were like" - Lena said tentatively. "Or who was in them. So I attacked someone in the street and went to jail. That was interesting."

"Interesting?" - Hauk smirked. "More interesting than your stay at the Imperial City Prison some two hundred years ago?"

"Well, no, not quite as dramatic as that" - Lena grinned. "But they have quite a varied selection of prisoners here, and no cells."

"No cells?" - Hauk looked up. "And the prisoners don't escape?"

"No, they can't. There's no way out. When you are due for release, the guards open up a manhole in the ceiling, shout your name, and if you are quick enough to appear, they throw you a rope and pull you out. They might try it a few times if you don't appear immediately, but after that they just give up. Most people rot there for the rest of their lives." Lena shuddered.

"Wow, that's decisive" - Hauk whistled. "And you can't pay your fine here either, only bribe the guard. But that's devolution for you - the Empire does not dictate its member states how to handle their prisoners." He contemplated the soap for a while. "So, did you meet anyone of interest down there?"

"The ones who hadn't lost hope yet, tend to stay close to the manholes - no one knows when they'd be due for release because it's impossible to tell the passage of time down there. But the ones that gave up, retreat to the back reaches of the dungeon, and lead a life of their own."

"Meaning?"

"They are cannibals."

"Oh!" - Hauk looked at Lena with worry. "And?"

"My wraith had a lot of fun chasing after them" - she smirked.

"Namira won't be happy about that! She protects them." Hauk looked at Lena with significance. "Remember Skyrim."

"Well, she wasn't there, was she?" - Lena replied with defiance. "And I didn't kill them all. I bet the survivors are grateful to me for all the fresh food they've got now."

"I think you should avoid getting arrested in the future" - Hauk said casually. "Next time it could be vampires, you never know. They might enjoy a slice of a juicy young mortal like yourself."

Hysterical laughter emanating from the bath house caused a few more heads to turn, but the bustle of the Corinthe market soon drowned out the noise. Lena and Hauk would be leaving on the morrow.


~~~~~~~~~
The business with the Arch Mage is a part of a new quest to appear in the next release of Elsweyr Mysteries. So I am not revealing anything about that!

4 Frostfall, 4E202 - Corinthe bath house

"D'ya know what I find so str-hic-range?" Hauk kicked another empty bottle of sujamma. "We're in Elsw-wweyr, yet that's from Morrowind!"

"I d-don't mind," Lena giggled, taking another sip from her own sujamma bottle. "We don't discri-... mmm... -criminate?"

Sujamma-induced hilarity filled Corinthe bath house.

"Better not get into any ffffights now," Hauk shook his head. "I think there's thr-ree of you over there."

"But w-which one d'ya like best?" Lena laughed and sank under the water.

Hauk stared at her bathtub for a while, but as Lena wasn't coming up, he started getting worried, even through all the sujamma he'd consumed.

"Hey, c'm'n now, that's long enough!" He called, but Lena stayed under water. "Wh't'f'?" He swore and shook his head again, then cast a spell to try and clear at least some of the alcohol out of his system. The room stopped spinning. Hauk got out of his tub and walked over to Lena's. He could see her shape under water, but there were no bubbles coming up and she wasn't moving... "Hey!" He lifted her up, ready to push the water out of her lungs.

"Hmmm?" Lena opened her eyes, finding herself in Hauk's arms. "Wassss'up?"

"Phew," Hauk breathed out, setting her down on the rug. "You scared me."

"Why? With what?" Lena seemed to have sobered up too. "What did I do?"

"I thought you drowned!" He looked at her with worry and reproach. "You were drunk and I didn't see you cast any waterbreathing spells."

"Ah, but look at this," Lena stretched her neck to show a patch of skin covered in Argonian scales. "I did cast that spell."

"Gills," Hauk rubbed her neck as the spell started to wear off. "But I didn't see..."

"I was brought up by an Argonian, remember?" Lena smiled. "My grandma - my adoptive grandma - drilled it into me from an early age. I grow gills as soon as I enter the water now, quite subconsciously."

"That's..." Hauk was still examining the spot on Lena's neck where the gills were a few moments ago. "That's not how the rest of us do it, though." He cast a waterbreathing spell onto himself, but his appearance didn't change - there were no gills on his neck. "I can breathe under water now, but I didn't grow any new body parts."

"Oh..." It was Lena's turn to be surprised. "Wait..." She dispelled Hauk's waterbreathing spell, then cast one onto him herself. Still, Hauk had no gills on his neck.

"It feels the same, it's the same spell as what I use," he said. "But it isn't the same one that you cast automatically."

"Hmm... What I cast on you was the spell that Deetsan taught me back at the Guild," Lena mused. "Remember that awful story about the drowned associate?" Hauk nodded. "Well, Deetsan wanted to make sure I wasn't another one... She couldn't know of course that I already could breathe under water."

"Deetsan taught you the standard spell," Hauk nodded. "She herself being an Argonian, has no need of it, of course. But what your grandmother taught you with the gills - that's different. How do you do it?"

"I..." Lena tried to imagine herself casting that spell. It was indeed different. "I... don't actually cast any spells," she finally realised. "I transform." She paused, thinking of something. "Geralt is a werewolf, did you know that?" She suddenly asked.

"Yes, he told me," Hauk nodded. "Not just any werewolf though, he can transform at will. Or not transform even under full moon. He thought it was brought about by the witcher mutations."

"No, we have it from our father," Lena said slowly. "He was marked by Hircine for the Great Hunt of the Third Era, and we thought it was because he was Dragonborn. But may be there's more."

"How do you know this?" Hauk was listening intently, completely sober now.

"Skyrim..." Lena was transported in her thoughts to that day when she and Geralt saw a ghost of their father deliver a message to them in the Crystal Chasm near Falkreath. "Father left messages in Jyggalag's crystals for us, we found one of them. Geralt said he felt Hircine's call too, for the Great Hunt of our era. Skyrim is overrun with werewolves in preparation for the Hunt."

"Yes, I noticed the werewolves," Hauk nodded, ignoring the humour of his understatement. "But the Blood Moon hasn't risen yet."

"No," Lena was thoughtful too. "Geralt said it could be a while still... I am not sure how he knew, he just did. He said he would go to Solstheim when it was time."

"Hircine must have spoken to him," Hauk said firmly. "Like Molag Bal speaks to you - in your head. But you are not a werewolf... and I don't think your father was one, not from birth anyway. So what exactly did you inherit from him?"

"The ability to transform, according to Geralt," Lena looked straight at Hauk. "He thinks this is why I picked up vampirism so easily, this is why it wasn't cleared by the Witch's Potion, and this is why I am still... well... not rid of it."

"May be," Hauk didn't seem convinced. "But again, your father wasn't a vampire, and you do not transform at will. He was Dragonborn, which doesn't mean he could transform into a dragon."

"No, indeed," Lena nodded. "It allows us to learn the dragon language easily, that's all... Well, may be not all... We consume dragon souls, too. We absorb them."

"And how does that work, exactly?"

"You're asking me?" Lena looked up. "I have no idea! It just happens... I feel this surge of energy, and words in the dragon language rush through my mind, and I suddenly know what they mean... But it doesn't make me grow wings or talons!"

"But it does make you breathe fire," Hauk interjected. "Have you learned that one yet?" Lena nodded. "How do you do that?"

"Stop asking me questions I cannot answer!" Lena exclaimed half-annoyed, half-laughing. "It just happens!"

"Well, there must be more to it than 'just happens'," Hauk wasn't satisfied. "But if you don't know, then you don't know. This ends the interrogation," he winked at her and smiled.

"Oh, I'd like to have those answers too," Lena smiled back at him. "There's so much that doesn't add up here - about Geralt, me and our father, together and separately. And why do I feel that Father might still live... Geralt doesn't believe it, but I just know it..."

"Geralt isn't Dragonborn, you are," Hauk pointed out. "May be that matters. I guess time will tell."

Thinking about Geralt made Lena wistful - she missed him. She missed Skyrim too, a stark contrast to the hot sands of Elsweyr. But she was only half way through her assignment and they had to go further South still. She got up, sighed, and started clearing up the mess of empty sujamma bottles in the bath house.

"I am going to Morrowind after this," Hauk said suddenly. "After we're done in Elsweyr, that is," he clarified. "I shall be gone for a long time. I may not be back in time for when you give birth."

"Oh, I'll miss you," Lena hugged him. "How soon will you leave?"

"Right after your wedding," he looked into her eyes and kissed her softly. "Lucien will look after you and the newborn."

She smiled at him. "Yes, I have no doubt. But I still think the child is yours."

"Then I'd better stay alive in case you're right," he grinned. "And try to keep the babe's future uncle out of trouble too."

"Are you going to Solstheim?" Lena exclaimed in surprise.

"Not in the first instance, I have business on Vvardenfell... But when the Blood Moon rises, things will change."

"You too..?"

"No, but I can recognise the White Wolf even when he transforms. And I too want answers about Wolf Asgarsen, for your sake, if anything." Hauk started getting dressed, indicating that the topic was closed.

"So you too believe that the child is yours," Lena watched him, suddenly realising that he must have known it for a long time.

"I do," he nodded. "As does Lucien. But he will raise him, nevertheless."

"Him? It's a boy? How do you know?" Lena was still standing in the middle of the bath house, barely dressed. Everyone seemed to know more about her pregnancy than she did herself.

"If it's mine, it's a boy," Hauk grinned. "Runs in the family."

"Wishful thinking," Lena murmured and proceeded with getting dressed. "Men," she added to herself, not quite knowing what she meant by that. She wished her grandmother was still alive... she didn't remember her mother... and now that she was going to be a mother herself, she suddenly felt apprehensive about it. "Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it," she told herself, brushing away the anguish. The child in her belly turned, and she suddenly realised that that bridge was already behind her - her motherhood started the moment she decided to keep her pregnancy. She froze. She wasn't ready yet!

"You're doing fine," Hauk whispered in her ear, hugging her from behind. He noticed her standing there in the middle of the room with a hand on her belly and a look of horror on her face, and guessed what was going on. "Being a mother doesn't make you stop being yourself," he said, turning her around. "You're still a mage, an assassin, an adventurer, explorer of Ayleid ruins and slayer of monsters," he smiled. "And a woman. You don't stop being any of that."

"Thanks," Lena smiled, relaxing. "I don't know what came over me."

Hauk released his embrace, letting things fall into place again. It was good to get back to normal.

6 Frostfall, 4E202 - Scorpion fever

"Snow, we need more snow! There's not enough snow!"

Lena woke up on a beach in Southern Anequina, Hauk was tossing in his sleep next to her. His forehead felt hot.

"Uh-oh," Lena shook her head. "He's coming down with a fever."

Hauk was never ill. He could swim in a frozen river, then walk for miles in wet clothing, get hit by poisoned arrows, bitten by rabid wolves, and yet with a flick of his wrist he'd cast a healing spell, and be right as rain again. But here under the hot sun of Elsweyr, he got the fever... What was Lena to do?

"The cities here have no Temples of the Nine," she was thinking with regret. "Most don't even have any Temples at all," she sighed. "And there's no mandrake root..." She fumbled in her bag, finding a shrivelled piece that wouldn't yield any juice for Hauk to drink - he would have to chew on it and hope for at least some healing effect. "Out here, on the beach, far from everything... Not something I anticipated..." She threw a knife at an approaching red sand crab, hitting it at the base of its neck and killing it instantly. "At least lunch comes right to you," she smirked, retrieving her knife and preparing to roast the crab along with several others that she killed earlier. Hauk was partial to crab meat.

The sun was rising, and with it the breeze was getting warmer. Hauk was lying under a palm tree and some shrubs, and although they shielded him from the sun, he was still overheating. Cold sweat was gathering on his forehead in big beads that would swell, then melt and drip down into the sand, only to be replaced by new beads of sweat... He started thrashing, he was having a nightmare or a feverish delusion - Lena wasn't sure that his state could be described as "sleep".

"Salah..?" Lena could make out some of his disjointed speech. "Your Aunt... The medicine..." The rest was incomprehensible, but the thrashing got worse. "Sailors, they were sailors..." Lena cast a mild frost spell on Hauk and he calmed down a bit. "Cool, dark, looks fun..." The tone of his voice changed, it was calmer, more relaxed. "Scorpions... You filth!!"

Suddenly he sat up, awake.

"Huh?" He looked around, wiping off his forehead. "I was dreaming..." he smiled at Lena. "I got poisoned yesterday," he loosened the belt on his trousers, dropping them just enough to reveal an angry wound on his hip. "See, it's not healing. Scorpions. I don't do scorpions."

"Scorpions?" Lena noticed that the edges of Hauk's wound were black - it wasn't a fresh wound, yet she'd never seen it before. "But there are no scorpions here..."

"Not here - in Antaloor. A tar scorpion pinched me there... they are poisonous, but also magically corrupt, so the wound never heals. Yeah, you didn't see it before... It goes in remission, a bit like your vampirism. But when I get poisoned with something similar, it reappears, bright and angry..." He swore with resentment. "Some creature poisoned me yesterday, or may be some plant - there's a lot of strange stuff around here..." He glared at the surrounding palm trees. "Put some ice onto it, will you?"

Lena cast another frost spell and watched the ice crystals form and melt on the wound.

"So what do we do?" Lena looked at Hauk with worry - she had no idea how to treat something like that.

"Nothing, it will pass," Hauk sighed. "The fever will rise and fall a few times, then eventually it will subside. Don't pay any attention to what I might say when I'm rolling around with it," he winked. "None of it is true... Isn't it what you assassins say?" Sweat started gathering on his forehead again. "Here it comes." He lay down and braced for another nightmare.

"Yes," Lena said softly, realising that Hauk was getting delirious again. "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." She got nightshade extract out of a secret compartment of her bag, poured some into Hauk's mouth, swallowed the rest herself. Using her silver dagger, she sliced into the black flesh of Hauk's festering wound - a drop of dark coloured blood appeared on the surface. She bit into the cut and drank deeply. The world around her started to spin - she was falling into the Void, taking Hauk with her.

...

"You don't have the Sight," a man with a strange pale face and almost blank eyes was speaking with a shallow, echoing voice. "The Swallows will kill you."

"Yet I have to try," a tall, broad shouldered man insisted. "I must find out what happened."

"Well, if you must..." The pale man seemed to look right into Hauk's soul. "I can give you the Sight. Which eye do you want to sacrifice?"

Sharp pain seared through Hauk's skull as Eric was cutting into his eye. Yet besides the pain, there was something else... It wasn't just his flesh that Eric was cutting. "Once you get the Sight, you will never be able to lose it, and you will want to," several people had warned Hauk. "The curse of Sight is that seeing is believing." Hauk didn't understand it at the time.

The visions came and went. The Sight allowed Hauk to see shadows of what once was, in places where something of importance had happened. A memory would linger if the event involved strong emotions or a lot of magic. At first he thought that he was seeing ghosts, but then he realised that some of the people in the visions he had met, so they were not dead and those were not their ghosts. "Seeing is believing" meant that he now knew the truth, knew what really happened in Antaloor some twenty five years ago - a huge magical explosion ripping through that space, devastating the larger part of the island he was on, creating a corrupt forest known as the Swallows. What was once a tropical island became a dark and warped jungle filled with mutated beasts, demons and other creatures that he didn't know how to classify. Yet the Swallows wasn't without human habitation. The people who lived there, were affected by the magical corruption as well - their skin was unnaturally pale, their eyes almost blank, their voices strangely hollow, and they had the Sight. These people moved through the darkness like shadows, blending with their surroundings, surprising Hauk more than once with their sudden appearance. They did not congratulate him on gaining the Sight, rather they commiserated with him - some truths were best left unknown.

It was there, in the dark forest of the Swallows that Hauk got pinched by a tar scorpion. Tar scorpions were common there - they were once the regular giant scorpions native to Antaloor, but the magic explosion corrupted them, turning their chitin black. They were just as poisonous as their regular cousins, and that alone could kill a man, assuming one avoided getting one's head clipped clean off with those razor sharp pincers. But on top of that, tar scorpions spread magical corruption, so any wound they inflicted, would never heal. Every resurgence of the poisonous fever sent Hauk back to Antaloor, back to the Swallows, the caves, the swamps and the towers filled with anguish and suffering that he was forced to see through the power of the Sight. It was a curse indeed.

...

"Which way?" A strangely familiar young woman appeared next to Hauk. "Which way to the scorpion cave?"

"What?" Hauk spun around. "What scorpion cave? What are you talking about? Who are you? Wait... I see..." A vision of the gates of Sovngarde made Hauk stop. "That... hasn't happened yet."

"And this isn't Antaloor," Lena said softly. "We must find the cave where you got poisoned, I must try to stop the corruption."

"That won't be easy," Hauk smirked. "But there's no point in arguing, is there?"

"None," Lena confirmed. "Now, which way?"

The Swallows wasn't an easy area to cross, and its version within the Void wasn't any different. As a mortal, Lena still could not navigate the Void, but her repeated outings had taught her at least how to find the island that she wanted. The nightshade extract and Hauk's corrupted blood helped her to get in, even if she wasn't entirely sure how to get out. Something would come up, she argued. It always did.

"I don't know which way," Hauk was apologetic. "It happened more than once... There are a lot of tar scorpions here! Well, there were, in Antaloor. What do you intend to do?"

"I don't know," it was Lena's turn to be apologetic. "Something will come up."

She turned and started walking before Hauk could stare her down.

"Watch out!" She barely took two steps and got hit by something green and slimy. It stang like acid, eating away at her skin. Stingers. Elephant-sized mosquitoes with an acid spit. "You won't last here this way!" Hauk screamed, pushing Lena behind a rock. "This isn't Tamriel!" He raised his staff and cast a spell, summoning a giant spider that promptly attacked the nearest stinger. He cast another spell sending a missile through the air that exploded behind the largest stinger summoning three spiders there. When the total number of legs reached a hundred, he crouched behind the rock next to Lena. "Let me see that acid burn," he opened up her collar to expose the area, took a vial from his bag and smeared the viscous liquid over the burn. The stinging stopped.

"This is the wrong way around," Lena smiled. "I'm supposed to be saving you... and you're supposed to be delirious with fever." She looked at his attire - a robe like she'd never seen before, a heavy staff that looked more like a blunt weapon than a magical instrument, a sword on one hip, a dagger on the other.


"I didn't know you could summon giant spiders," she pointed at the battle of multi-legged creatures that was still raging just ahead.

"Well, now you do," Hauk smiled at her. "These are very mean poisonous ones, native to here... They don't turn up in Tamriel. Stay behind this rock," he looked at her sternly. "There's a Colossus up ahead."

Lena looked where Hauk was pointing but saw nothing but some twisted branches. Then the branches grew bigger, turned into a tree with a vaguely humanoid shape, the tree was now marching towards them, swinging its massive arms... Hauk shot a missile from his staff, fire, Lena thought, that staggered the Colossus for a moment, long enough for Hauk to get close. Another fireball, and then... he spun around and hit the Colossus with his staff - the heavy crystal on its top end was not just for focussing magic. Another hit, and the Colossus fell to his feet.

"What are you doing?" Lena couldn't stay behind the rock and was now crouching next to Hauk who was cutting into the Colossus' trunk with his dagger. "That heart is still beating!" She exclaimed with horror seeing what Hauk was stashing into his bag. "But why? We won't be staying here! Not long enough to indulge in alchemy, anyway!"

"May be not," Hauk looked weary. "But I want to make sure he doesn't get up," he kicked it suspiciously. "Come on - that way."

There was a path before them, a clearing of sorts where the bushes weren't as dense as elsewhere. Lena thought she could even see cobblestones.

"This was a road once," Hauk confirmed. "There is a ruin of a temple over there," he pointed at an area darker than the rest. "But let's not go there, this is where the explosion happened... I'd rather not relive it again," he added, his brow furrowed. The Sight was manifesting itself.

"Where are we going?" Lena was surprised that Hauk suddenly knew where to go.

"That way," he waved in the general direction of forward. "There are... things... if anything... may be that..." He was muttering, not making any sense to Lena, and she was hoping he was making sense to himself. This was no time to come down with a delirious fever.

"Watch out!" Hauk yelled again, pulling Lena to the side so hard, she nearly fell. A man of sorts stood where she was a moment ago, his sword drawn, and he was lunging at her... Suddenly time stood still. Every sound was hushed, Lena's limbs felt mushy and lifeless, she was being pulled to the side, thrown to the ground, out of reach of the man's sword. She saw Hauk spinning with his staff outstretched, felling several such men in one twirl. They fell to the ground, but they were not dead, far from it, they were rising, two, three, six of them... A bolt of some dark energy was flying towards Lena and Hauk, there must be a mage a little further away... Slow motion seized as suddenly as it began, the air was ripping with the sounds of lightning, screams, taunts, animal noises. Six men in black armour were rushing at Lena and Hauk, their swords, maces and spears pointing at them. "Fire! Use fire!" Hauk screamed, casting fireballs and spinning his staff, aiming at their heads. Lena caught herself, summoned a clannfear, but the spell failed - it wasn't Tamriel. She swore, drawing her sword, casting a fire shield, all in one motion. The man nearest to her was already lunging, no time to block, damn that footwork - Geralt was right! She was nearly tripping over her own feet now... Some assassin! Oh wait... assassin...

Invisibility did work. Her attacker's lunge found its target though, and Lena felt the trickle of blood running along her side, yet she felt no pain... Strange... But at the same time she felt empty... "Is that how a victim feels when a famished vampire sucks them dry?" She wondered. Her disappearance disoriented her attacker for a moment, he stopped, looking around, then noticed Hauk who was fighting three others. "No!" Lena thought with defiance. "Not like this!" She lunged, aiming for the man's heart. Her sword made contact, and the man fell, but was his chest empty? The sword ran through him and Lena didn't feel his heart. At that moment another bolt of that dark energy hit Lena, and she felt emptier still, her will faultering.

"An assassin fights with his will as much as with his weapon," she recalled Altair's words. "You must always act to your greatest advantage." Right. Act to your greatest advantage, not rush into battle against overwhelming odds and get slaughtered. The mage.

The mage was standing behind a rock shooting spells from cover. There was no way for Hauk to shoot back, even if he wasn't fighting several others already. He was getting pale, Lena noticed, and grey somehow... Were those bolts of dark energy doing that? But she had no time to think about it. She had no magicka left for another invisibility spell, so she crouched and moved towards the mage, keeping to the bushes. She hoped her footwork would not fail her now.

The mage was too tall for her to reach his heart from crouching, and she hoped that his kidney would do. He wasn't wearing armour, just robes. She thrust her dagger into his side and drove it under his ribs. He stopped casting, staggered and fell, but he wasn't dead, he went for his dagger. This was going to be a messy battle.

Hauk realised that the casting had stopped, shrugged off the remaining effects of the hostile spells and finished the last attacker with simple decapitation. He looked around. Six Vidons were littering the ground, but something was going on behind the rock... Huffs and puffs, moans and swears, cries of pain and then silence. Somebody won. He hoped it was Lena.

He moved slowly, leaning heavily onto his staff. The Vidons were not to be trifled with, and he didn't come away unscathed. It took him a few minutes to walk the short stretch to the rock behind which Lena and the mage had their fight, behind which they both still lay. He heard movement, then quiet swearing... too high-pitched for a Vidon, he realised with relief. Lena was cleaning her dagger on the mage's robes, and it wasn't an easy task.

"Does this blood ever come off?" She shot a glance at Hauk, taking in his battered condition. "Sit down," she patted a small rock next to her. "We won't be going anywhere for a while. What were they?"

"Vidons," Hauk replied, dropping heavily onto the rock. "Very dangerous. They come from under the earth - through the earth. They have no hearts or souls, they are neither dead nor alive. Tall, strong, hard to kill. Their mages are the worst... They drain your soul."

"Tar scorpions seem warm and cuddly in comparison," Lena smiled.

"Yeah..." Hauk shot her a glance. "You shouldn't be here. This is my burden to bear. I had to have the Sight... I had been warned. It cannot be undone. It isn't the tar scorpion's poison that pulls me here, it's the Sight."

"So, I cannot save you," Lena said softly. "I was foolish and rash, I didn't think. I didn't ask. I thought I knew it all." She stared before her, keeping her hand on that wound in her side that was still bleeding. "And now... we might both perish here."


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is an account of real events seen in Two Worlds II.

That was really exciting. Had me on the edge of my seat at the end.

6 Frostfall, 4E202 - Castle Vahkmaar

"Well, darling, welcome home!" Hauk was thrown down the stairs in a dingy dungeon, a cell gate lock clicked behind him. "Long time no see!" The guards' laughter was mocking. "Oh, watch yourself - don't want bruising that pretty face again."

It was best not to reply, and Hauk didn't.

"Here's another one," another guard was leading the second prisoner, a young woman, bound and gagged. "She spits a lot," he explained apologetically.

"What are we to do with her?" The first two guards looked confused, although there was no shortage of empty cells in the dungeon. "There was only supposed to be the one prisoner!"

"I don't know, lock her up!" The newcomer was getting annoyed. "It's a jail, isn't it?" He pushed the woman into a cell and kicked the door shut. The lock clicked.

"Now what did you do that for?!" The two resident guards glared at him. "We've got no keys to that door!"

"Who cares?" The newcomer shrugged. "She'll rot in here anyway." He looked sternly at them and left.

"She'll rot in here now, that's for sure," the guard who was mocking Hauk previously, turned to look at the woman in the cell. "Such a shame. Come here, I'll untie your hands at least," he added, addressing the woman.

Lena approached, extending her hands through the bars. The guard wasn't a monster, just a soldier like many others. Not a proper jailor either, she noted. He untied her hands and removed her gag. "Don't spit at me," he smiled. "Although I can see why you'd want to spit at the others. We'll see if we can get you some food..." he shot a glance at the other guard. "There isn't enough food for two, you see," he continued explaining. "And darling in the other cell is supposed to be well fed," he glared at Hauk. "Well, he'll just have to go a little less well fed than usual, won't he?"

"They'll have our heads if they ever notice," the other guard objected. "I say we let the girl starve. They never told us what to do with her. She can have water, but nothing else."

The guards left.

...

Once Lena and Hauk recovered somewhat from that tough battle against the Vidons in the Swallows, Hauk insisted they should find shelter and rest, even though Lena kept telling him that they were not in real Antaloor, that this was a pocket of the Void, and normal rules did not apply.

"May be you are right, but can you walk?" Hauk interrupted the flood of reasons why they shouldn't be resting. "Didn't think so," he pointed at the bleeding wound in her side. "This needs bandaging up, you need rest, whichever world this is, or else you'll be dead within the hour. Come on." He helped her up and pointed at a door hidden between the branches. "This shouldn't be too hard. There may be some creatures inside, but nothing we can't handle."

The door led to a disused training room. It was indeed infested by some giant multi-legged wildlife, but Hauk summoned a few spiders and they cleared it all up. There was no food, but they found some water, although it didn't look fresh. "Good enough," Hauk tasted it and passed it to Lena. "Now, let's see that wound of yours..."

It didn't take long, and they were both asleep on the old beds of whichever guild used to call this place home. In Antaloor, they would have woken up in exactly the same room a few hours later, but this wasn't Antaloor.

...

"What was all that about?" Lena peered through the bars - Hauk's cell was a bit further away. "Darling? They know you?"

"The real guards know me, yes," Hauk was testing the strength of the bars. "But this isn't Castle Vahkmaar. We went to sleep in the old training room in the Swallows, we woke up in a torture chamber of Castle Vahkmaar dungeons, and I wouldn't even be surprised at that, but the scene that just played out, happened long before I ever knew that Swallows even existed... In fact, the reason they kept me well fed... Well, let's just say, that reason had been dead for many years now! Time doesn't flow in a straightforward fashion in the Void, does it?" He sighed.

"Time has no meaning here at all," Lena nodded. "The question is how to get out of here. And once we're out, you can tell me all about the reason you were being well fed," she winked, but Hauk was too far to notice.

"Well, last time I got out..." Hauk started saying, then interrupted himself, hearing distant footsteps - those were not the guards. "Why, what do you know..." he muttered.

"Time to go," a slender Orc vixen was fiddling with the lock on his door. "Hurry and make no noise - I didn't kill them all."


The lock clicked and she was just about to turn around and run, when Hauk caught her by the arm, pulling her close.

"Dar-Pha..."

Lena couldn't see what was happening, but the sounds of shuffling, a stifled surprise and deeply felt moans were clear enough.

"You?" Hauk was speaking very softly, but sound carried in those old dungeons. "Is it really you or is it your shadow? Your eye! What happened to your eye?"

"It's really me, and never mind the eye," Dar-Pha whispered back. "Which demon brought you here? It wasn't for this that we pulled you out back then!" She sounded angry. "And this isn't Antaloor - it will be harder this time!"

"Dar-Pha..." Hauk didn't seem to be listening. "It's been so long..."

"Wrong place!" She tried to sound stern but wasn't succeeding. "There will be time for it later."

No, Hauk wasn't listening. When the sounds of reunion finally stopped, the conversation continued.

"The demon that brought me here is locked up in the other cell," Hauk answered the question. "Don't be too hard on her though..." But Dar-Pha was already fiddling with the lock on Lena's door. The door swung open, and Lena faced two black eyes burning right through her. One living eye, and the other... there was something wrong with it, she realised.

"I see," Dar-Pha nodded to Lena. "Well, come on. We can talk later."

Dar-Pha led them through a maze of corridors, some dark, some flooded, some covered in the slime of bodily fluids... Then suddenly they stood on a marble-clad spiral staircase looking at an impressive door of wrought iron.

"Through here," Dar-Pha threw over her shoulder, fiddling with the lock.

"No, Dar-Pha, not this time," Hauk stopped her. "The others are not with you, are they?"

"We know what's on the other side of this door! We have no time to stand here and discuss it like a committee! Many people gave their lives for this information, and I'd rather their sacrifice was not in vain!" She was about to resume fiddling with the lock, when Hauk grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

"Snap out of it, Dar-Pha!" He said with urgency. "This was what happened then. You don't need to lecture me again," he smiled.

She froze for a moment, piercing him with her gaze. If looks could kill, this vixen would have had no need of her dagger. She relaxed, anger replaced by worry.

"Right. Yes, you are right. We are replaying the same story," she looked around, as if seeing it for the first time. "But there's three of us now, and this isn't Antaloor," she looked at Lena. "Why did you bring him here?"

"I thought we had no time to discuss things like a committee!" Lena started tentatively. She wasn't sure what to think of Dar-Pha, but if it was an argument that Dar-Pha wanted, Lena was happy to oblige.

At that point they were both proven right as the doors swung open and six soldiers poured into the staircase, swords at the ready, with archers at the back. No time for a committee debate indeed!

"Run!!!" Dar-Pha yelled, diving head first into the crowd of soldiers, pushing them out of the way and disappearing around the corner somewhere ahead. Lena and Hauk followed.

"Where did she go?" Lena hit a marble wall at the end of the corridor, but there was no sight of Dar-Pha. Hauk was there though.

"There are side corridors off this main one," he turned around. "She must have turned off, but I didn't see where to..."

At this point the soldiers caught up with them and a hot fight ensued. It was still no time for discussions.

The soldiers had razor sharp heavy longswords, shields, maces and daggers and they where wearing armour. Their archers at the back where shooting fire arrows. Lena and Hauk were dressed in prison rags and had no weapons - this wasn't a fair fight. Yet the soldiers seemed careful not to kill them, or at least not to kill Hauk - they didn't care what happened to Lena, she noticed. Without his staff, Hauk couldn't do much magic, yet he managed to summon a skeleton - weak in itself, it still provided a distraction, and the nearest soldier stopped in surprise. Hauk knocked over his own skeleton, picking up its mace and smashed the skull of the soldier. They now had weapons.

With their backs to the wall, and without much room to manoeuvre, it didn't look good. The soldiers put up their shields, blocking all attacks. Lena cast paralysis a few times, it bought her a little time, but it was a costly spell to cast and her magicka wasn't returning as fast as usual. Still, she got to the archers, crouched, and took out her dagger. "An assassin always acts to the greatest advantage," she thought to herself. Without the fire arrows raining down on him, Hauk was making better progress with the soldiers.

"That's the last of them," Dar-Pha put away her own dagger when the last archer was dead. "Take the left flank, I'll take the right." This was an order and Lena obeyed.

"Finally!" An Orc with a massive sword appeared from a side corridor just when the last soldier dropped to the floor with a thump. "We started getting worried."


"Rogdor?" Hauk looked up. It seemed the scene from long ago was still playing.

"What? You? And who is this?" Rogdor took in the view and focussed on Lena. "Is she..? No. She shouldn't be here." Then evidently dismissing her, he turned to Hauk. "Come on. As disappointing as it is to do it again, we have to keep moving."

He too was proven right as more soldiers appeared behind him.

"Will it never end?!" Hauk yelled, this time holding his own in the battle that followed.

"You are in a better shape this time," Rogdor grinned, shaking the blood off his sword. "We might even pull off plan A." And without another word, he ran ahead, with Hauk, Lena and Dar-Pha following.

"This is all wrong," Hauk thought to himself. "We are replaying the old story, yet everyone seems to know it. I wonder if Sordahon..."


"And where do you think you are going?" A massive knight with an even more massive sword stood in the middle of the next room.

"Sordahon..!" Rogdor leapt at him, his sword outstretched. Sordahon swept him aside with a single move. If the real Sordahon was a formidable fighter, this version of him was greatly amplified. Dar-Pha took out her dagger, and Lena couldn't suppress a snigger - a dagger against this monster? But Dar-Pha wasn't paying attention to Lena, she was fixed on Sordahon, piercing him with her gaze, as if seeing past his armour... What did she see?

"Drop it, Sordahon!" Hauk bellowed, shooting a fireball from his wrist. Sordahon turned and took a step towards him, sending a shock bolt back at Hauk.

"I learned a few tricks since last time," he smirked. "You ought to be quiet. It's a pity I can't just kill you..."

Hauk was out cold and Sordahon turned to Lena.

"You, on the other hand..." He raised his sword - in the next moment Lena would be split in half...

"NO!!!" The scream seemed to come from all directions, and it did. Rogdor leapt onto Sordahon again, ready to plunge his sword into Sordahon's neck, just where the helmet ended and the cuirass didn't quite begin. Dar-Pha leapt at Sordahon too, her dagger aiming at his side, under the arm, between the plates of armour. But a fierce fireball got him first, coming from behind, the force of the impact pushed him forward, past Lena, smashing him into the wall. Dar-Pha ended on top of Rogdor, Lena was swept aside, and several guards that rushed to aid their master, lay singed on the floor. An Orc mage stood at the back of the room, fire still in his hand, skulls and bones adorning his robes.


"You never quite know when you might need a good fireball," he smacked his lips in satisfaction. "Are we done here? The teleport is just ahead." And while everyone except Sordahon was getting up from the floor, he shot a quizzical glance at Lena. "I don't remember you... surely we didn't drink that much! Who are you and what are you doing here?" His tone did not encourage disobedience.

"I... umm..." Lena started, then suddenly remembered that it was all her fault... Them being there, the scene being replayed, history repeating itself... So many people involved... Were they their real selves or were they mere shadows created for the sake of the performance? Was that all smoke and mirrors or... could they all just die there?

"She's the demon that brought him here," Dar-Pha jerked her head towards Hauk. "What of Gandohar?"

"The same person we left last time," the mage said, not taking his eyes off Lena. "With the same needs."

"Oh!!!" Dar-Pha looked worried and Rogdor looked grim. "That..." Dar-Pha hesitated.

"That is a disaster," the mage nodded. "Grant a human free will, and they will bring down the world. I'll never understand what you see in them."

Dar-Pha was about to protest, but another wave of soldiers poured into the room, and the fighting resumed.