jfraser

Cicero will surely also be subdued. I'm not sure the Night Mother can get more subdued. XD At least she would be in the right comic universe. And Batman can't fly, so I think she could make a reasonable claim for accuracy when faced with a flying batman and conferring some Supes abilities to him. If that happens, Sanguine will go out of his way to make sure everytime Bat-Sloan hits someone, there is a BAM or POP flashcard that shows up.

thank you! yes, i am working on the formatting for those. it is harder than it looks! i am going to have to split the physcial edition into two parts because it is too long after formatting.

Well, yes, he has the length to give her the pain she craves. But dick size is not all there is to being a good lover. Urag treated her as a lover. From what little we have seen of her sex with Nyatt, it sounds like he has just been laying there enjoying having wives for the first time in his life. But, again, it's hard to tell -- there isn't enough information at this time. Fair point on the second part -- the author is a tease, not a hack.

Does he, though? We know Aithne has been doing her orc wifely duties but we haven't really heard about her feelings about them. We have no idea how he is as a lover. This could mean he is so basic that she just considers fucking him to be a chore or that the author is a hack who skips important details. Hard to say which

She is very likely curious what became of Jorg this time around, so that last part might not be farfetched. Neither of them appear to be smiths, though -- Jorg is a warrior and Nyatt...well, we don't know what he is good for, frankly, other than riding the coattails of stronger women and being tall.

I dunno, all the people who might have wanted Sutfu dead are likely dead themselves. His little games were much more hidden, cloaked by his position as a guard, this time. we don't know who Sloan’s parents are (since it apparently wasn't Melissa after all), so it is possible they are dead, so at least one Batsloan prerequisite could be in place. Now all she needs is billions of septims, a hidden underground fortress (easy enough to obtain in Skyrim), a butler, and a very discrete tailor/armorsmith.

Sloan rode out of Dawnstar with her contract still breathing and she was not entirely sure what she was going to say when she got back. She had been turning the thought over for hours now, worrying at it like a loose tooth. The Sanctuary lay to the south; the roads were open. She could turn the horse in any direction and be gone before anyone thought to look for her. She was not bound by debt or oath or the kind of blood pact the Brotherhood used to use to seal its members to the cause. She had walked in of her own accord and she could walk out the same way. No one had put a blade to her throat and told her to stay. And yet she was heading south. It did not make sense, not entirely. She had spent her whole life following orders -- first Kira and the Vixen, then Kira and the Tong, then Delphine for a time (that part bewildered her; she had just started doing whatever Delphine asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world), then Kira again, as if the world was determined to bring her back to the same starting point no matter how far she ran. She had moved through her existence like a piece on a game board, placed and repositioned by hands that were not her own, and she had never once asked whether she wanted to be part of the game at all. But standing over Beitild's bed, she had run out of reasons to stay in that role. In the first timeline, she had killed because she owed Kira her life, three times over. She had paid that debt in blood, year after year, until there was nothing left of her but the shape of a blade and the echo of a name she no longer recognized as her own. But what did she owe Kira this time? Nothing – whatever debt may have been incurred by the killing of Mishi had been repaid many times over, as far as Sloan was concerned. And where did that leave her? With a room in the Sanctuary, a place at a table full of killers, and contracts to fill. That was not a debt, it was a transaction. She did not owe Kira her obedience or her life. She was free. And yet she was heading south. Because running away would mean letting the fear of what Kira might do dictate her path, and she was done letting other people's expectations steer her. Because she had spared Beitild -- had looked at a woman who did not deserve to die and had said no -- and she was not going to hide from the consequences of that decision. She would face Kira and she would face the Night Mother and she would find out what price there was to pay for refusing them both. And then, if she was still alive, she would decide what came next. She was still thinking about what that meant when she rounded a bend and came upon a struggle. The first thing she saw was a body sprawled on the roadside, a man in weathered leather armor, his chest a mess of blood and torn fabric. He was alive -- barely -- his breath coming in wet, rattling gasps that Sloan could hear from thirty paces. His eyes were open but unfocused, fixed on the sky with the glassy stare of someone who had already left his body and was simply waiting for it to catch up. He would be dead within minutes, maybe sooner. The second was a woman, very pregnant, being wrestled toward a horse by a man in a Dawnstar guard uniform. She was fighting -- not well, not effectively, but with the desperate, thrashing energy of someone who had nothing left to lose. Her wrists were bound in front of her and the guard had one hand clamped around her upper arm while the other held a short sword that he was using more as a prod than a weapon. There was a fresh cut on her cheek and her lip was split. The guard looked up as Sloan approached. He had a soft face, a thick mustache, and a voice that came out surprisingly gentle given the circumstances. "Afternoon, traveler. Nothing to concern yourself with -- just bringing in a bandit." Sloan reined in her horse. She looked at the woman, who glared back with the exhausted hatred of someone who had been running for a long time and had finally been caught. She looked at the dying man on the ground. She looked at the guard. And she knew. It came the same way it had come with Beitild, as a sudden realization arriving whole and without invitation. She knew the woman was guilty -- she had been part of the band that had attacked a caravan three days ago, had killed innocent people then and before. The arrest was lawful. The guard was within his rights to haul her to Falkreath and throw her in a cell. She also knew what happened in those cells after dark. She knew it the same way -- a wave of knowledge that came from somewhere outside her, carrying images that were not images but certainties: a small knife, a soft voice asking questions that did not need answers, the particular pleasure this man took in finding the exact point where pain became something else. She knew the pregnant woman would not survive a week in his custody. She knew the guard had done this before, many times, and that no one had ever stopped him. Her name was Haen. His name was Sutfu. She did not know how she knew that, but she did. "Is that so?" Sloan kept her voice neutral, casual. She swung down from the horse, keeping her movements easy, unhurried. "Bandits, huh? This one give you much trouble?" "Plenty," Sutfu said, and his smile was warm, almost paternal. "But they always settle down eventually. Don't you, sweetheart?" Haen spat at him. It landed on his chest. He did not even look down. Sloan walked closer, angling herself so she was approaching from the side, her hands visible, her posture relaxed. Sutfu's attention was on Haen, who had stopped struggling and was now watching Sloan with a sort of desperate wariness. "Mind if I take a look at the other one?" Sloan gestured at the dying man. "I've got some field training. Might be able to save him." Sutfu considered this. His gaze flicked to the man on the ground, then back to Sloan, then to the woman, who had gone very still. "He's beyond saving," he said, still in that soft, pleasant voice. "But you're welcome to try." Sloan knelt beside the dying man. She knew his name was Maase and she knew Sutfu was right -- he was beyond her help. His chest was sliced deep, his breath was a death rattle. She placed a hand on his shoulder anyway, a meaningless gesture, and used the cover to adjust the angle of her body. Sutfu had turned back to the Haen, his grip on her arm shifting as he prepared to hoist her onto the horse. Haen's eyes met Sloan's. There was no plea in them -- she had already exhausted her capacity for hope. But there was something else -- a question. Sloan answered it by moving. She was on her feet in a single motion, her dagger already in her hand, and she crossed the distance in three steps. Sutfu heard her coming -- he was not incompetent -- and started to turn, started to bring his sword up, but he was off-balance with a handful of struggling prisoner. Sloan's dagger took him in the side, just below the ribs, angled up. He made a sound -- not a scream, more a surprised exhale -- and his grip on Haen's arm went slack. Haen did not wait for instruction -- she wrenched free, stumbled back, and stood with her bound hands held out in front of her, breathing hard. Sloan pulled her dagger free. Sutfu folded to his knees, both hands pressed to the wound, his soft face contorted into something that was almost confusion. "What…why…" he started. Sloan stepped past him, grabbed the woman's bindings, and sliced through them with a single motion. "Can you ride?" The woman stared at her. "Who in Oblivion are you?" "Someone who just killed a Dawnstar guard for you. Can you ride?" The woman looked at the horse, then her own belly, then let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob. "I'll manage." Sloan nodded and turned back to Sutfu. He had fallen onto his side, his blood pooling dark against the frozen ground. She knelt beside him, close enough to see the confusion still flickering behind his eyes, and she felt something she had not expected: not satisfaction, not pity. Just certainty. The same certainty that had told her Beitild would not die told her he would. "You're going to bleed out. It'll take a few minutes. Maybe longer, if you're lucky. I've seen similar wounds take an hour." She stood. "That's more time and much less pain than you gave many of them." She walked to her horse and mounted. Haen had already hauled herself onto Sutfu's horse, her movements awkward but determined, her bound hands now free and gripping the reins with white-knuckled intensity. "Why?" the woman asked. Sloan considered the question. She could have said because he was a monster. She could have said because you're pregnant. She could have said because I'm tired of watching people die for the wrong reasons. All of these were true, and none of them were the whole truth. "Because I can. And because I've spent my whole life doing what other people told me to. I'm done with that." She gathered her reins. “You still need to pay for your crimes. I won’t take you to Dawnstar but I will turn you in at Morthal.” She shook her head as Haen’s face darkened and she started to draw back. “Please don’t run – it will not work. You know what you’ve done. Whatever your reasons, there are some actions you cannot take back.” As who would know better than she? Sloan was glad she could not see herself with these new eyes – hers sins probably looked like a hole of pure darkness. Haen stared at her for a long moment, then her shoulders slumped and she nodded, once, and turned her horse west without another word. Sloan followed. Behind her, Sutfu made a wet, rattling sound that might have been an attempt at speech. She did not turn around. She had a duty now -- a small one, a temporary one, a promise to see a guilty woman to the right authorities before she headed south to face whatever Kira had waiting for her. It was not the path she had planned; it was not a path she had ever imagined herself taking. But it was hers. She rode west with a dead man she wasn't supposed to kill and a living woman she was behind her, and for the first time in both of her lives, the choices she had made today were ones she had arrived at on her own. Next chapter Previous chapter Start from the beginning Join the Shae's Discord! If you like my work, please consider supporting me by buying my book. It is good, I promise!

These problems happen even when you start a brand new game, right? Not a save after you added, subtracted, or updated mods.

ah, a new leash mod! how did i miss this. now we need a mod to connect this to defeat mod and have the NPC drag the player to simple slavery, like we had very briefly in the original SS.

Who doesn't love Cicero? Other than, you know, Kira. He makes EVERYthing awkward. XD Well, presumably Sloan would have known someone else was there and waited. Unless they never came out. Hmm... There will be some...distractions when she gets back. You'll find out what kind on August 23.

When Sloan was finally called back to Kira’s office, the Matron was seated and appeared composed, but the composition felt assembled rather than natural -- each piece felt deliberately set into place. It was, by far, the most unsettled Sloan had ever seen her, including even their last meeting before the end of the previous world. A parchment lay before her, held flat beneath two fingers. “Beitild." Kira said the name with clear loathing. “Foreman of the iron mine in Dawnstar. The Black Sacrament was performed in Morthal three weeks ago. The name matches.” A pause, slight but measurable. “It is…confirmed.” Her distaste at saying the words was palpable -- it lived in the cadence, in the fractional hesitation before the final word, in the way her hand did not leave the parchment, as though releasing it would concede something she had not yet decided to yield. “You will fulfill this contract. Do not speak to anyone else until it is done. We will…observe the...” "Ohhhhh, but the Matron cannot be serious!" The voice came from the corridor, high and bright and chiming with the faint jingle of bells that preceded its owner into the room. Cicero emerged from the shadows like a puppet yanked forward by invisible strings, his painted face split by a grin that did not reach his eyes. He swept into the room with arms wide, motley fluttering, and came to a stop between Sloan and Kira with the precise timing of a performer. "The Listener," he declared, pressing one hand to his chest and extending the other toward the ceiling, "does not kill. She hears. Then she speaks. She passes along what Mother whispers in the quiet dark. That is the division of labor, the ancient and sacred arrangement, the way it has always been and the way it must be if we are to…" "Cicero." Kira's voice was flat. He ignored her, spinning to face Sloan with an expression of theatrical desperation. "Oh, you see it, don't you? You feel it? Mother does not speak through the blade -- she speaks through the voice, and the voice must be protected, must be cradled like a candle in a storm, must not be sent stumbling into the cold where any passing wind could…" "Cicero." He stopped mid-gesture, arms frozen, then turned his head toward Kira with the slow mechanical precision of a toy winding down. The grin had not left his face, but something behind it had gone very still. "The Listener goes," Kira said. "This is not a negotiation." Cicero's hands lowered. He drew himself up, straightened his motley, and sang, softly and sadly, like a child at a funeral: "Oh, the Keeper watches, the Keeper waits, The Keeper stands at the Mother's gates. But what is a voice without a throat? What is a song without a note?" He tilted his head, and his voice dropped from its manic pitch into something quieter, flatter, carrying an edge of real feeling beneath the performance. "She is the first voice we have had in a decade, Matron. The first voice. If she falls -- if she is captured or killed or simply takes a wrong step -- we go back to silence. The silence you have filled with your informants and your bribes and your little paper webs." He took a step toward her, and his bells did not ring. "But silence is still silence. And Mother does not speak through paper." "Then I suppose she should not fall, be captured, be killed, or take any wrong steps." Cicero's face flickered -- a crack in the mask so brief Sloan almost missed it -- and then the grin snapped back into place, wider than before, brighter, more desperate. He held Kira’s gaze for a long moment. Something in his shoulders sagged and the theatricality seeped back into his posture like water returning to a dry riverbed. He bowed -- deep, extravagant, bells chiming in a cascade of notes -- and when he straightened, his singsong cadence had returned. "As the Matron wills, the Listener goes, Into the wind, the cold and the snow. Cicero prays she comes back home, For a voice unheard is a voice alone." He spun on his heel and pranced toward the corridor, but paused at the threshold. For just a moment, the mask slipped again, and when he spoke, it was quiet and direct -- no bells, no song, no performance. "Mother did not choose you to die for Her, Listener. She chose you to speak for Her." Then he was gone, bells trailing behind him like an answer to a question no one had asked. Sloan met the Matron’s gaze for a moment, then nodded, rose, and left as well. --- The trek to Dawnstar took seven days of riding into a steady wind that grew colder each day. The landscape shifted as she traveled north, from the pine forests of the Pale to the scrubby, wind-scoured flats that bordered the coast, the trees thinning and hunching until they gave up entirely, leaving nothing but frost-hardened earth and the distant gleam of ice. She smelled the Sea of Ghosts before she saw it. The salt hit her first, sharp and briny, carried on a wind that cut through her cloak like it had been woven from needles. Then the sound -- the crash of waves against frozen shore, the groan of ice shifting against ice, the distant cry of seabirds wheeling over dark water, the low harrrung-ing calls of horker. By the time the town came into view, she could taste the sea on her lips, cold and metallic and ancient. Dawnstar sprawled along the coast like a shipwreck that had decided to stay. The iron mine dominated the southeastern edge of town, its entrance a dark mouth in the side of a low hill surrounded by the skeletal frames of ore carts and the black scars of tailings. The harbor lay to the north, a crescent of gray water dotted with fishing boats and the occasional merchant cog, their masts swaying in rhythms unreadable to those who did not sail. Between them, the town itself -- low buildings huddled against the wind, their roofs weighted with stones against the gales that swept in off the sea, smoke rising from chimneys in thin, desperate streams. Sloan watched from vantage points on a ridge overlooking the mine worksite until the sun bled into the sea and the harbor darkened to iron-gray. The wind cut at her from every angle and the stone bled cold through her cloak, but it gave her an unobstructed view of the entrance, the sorting area, and the path that led into town. Beitild was not hard to identify, and not only because the moment she appeared, something in Sloan shouted, “THERE!” like a hyperactive hunting dog. She emerged from the mine at midday, her face streaked with dust and her bearing carrying the particular authority of someone who had earned her position through competence rather than favor. She moved through the worksite with an economy of motion that Sloan recognized -- the same efficiency she had seen in master craftsmen, in seasoned soldiers, in Kira herself. She stopped to speak with a worker who had flagged her down; the man gestured at a cart with a broken wheel, and Beitild examined it with a critical air before nodding and saying something that made the man's shoulders relax. She clapped him on the arm and continued on her circuit, stopping twice more to speak to others. The word about town, gleaned from casual questions in the right places later that night, painted Beitild as hard-working, no-nonsense, and respected, and that rarest of things in this Skyrim – a woman in charge of men. Sloan began to suspect that was the “fault” that had led to this assignment. Over the course of the next few days, she noted Beitild's routines: she left the mine at the same time each day, walked the same route home along the waterfront, spoke to the same group of people. She lived alone in a small house near the harbor, its chimney smoking for an hour after she arrived and then dying down. She did not seem to have visitors or, for that matter, enemies. She seemed, in every observable way, like a woman who had spent her life working the rock and the tide and causing no harm. --- An unseasonal warm spell on Sloan’s fourth day in Dawnstar brought a gift – a heavy blanket of fog that reduced visibility to two arm-lengths. Even Sloan’s darkness-piercing vision could not penetrate it. She took advantage of the secrecy it provided and slipped through the town to Beitild’s door. The lock was simple -- a single tumbler, well-worn, barely a lock at all. Sloan had it open in less than a heartbeat, the mechanism clicking aside with a softness that would have been inaudible to anyone not listening for it. The interior was sparse but clean – a table with a single chair, its surface scarred from years of use; a hearth with the remains of a small fire, the ashes still carrying a faint warmth; a shelf with a few dishes, a cup, a worn copy of a book whose title had been lovingly held to obscurity; a doorway leading to a bedroom, and through it the slow, even breathing of someone deeply asleep. The sea whispered against the shore beyond the window. The roof creaked once, settling against the cold. Sloan moved through the dark until she stood next to the bed and studied her mark. Beitild lay on her side, her face relaxed in sleep, her hands curled loosely near her chest. She was not young -- forty, perhaps, maybe older -- and her face carried the lines of a life lived outdoors, in weather and in work. Her hair, streaked with gray, was tied back in a practical braid that had come loose at the edges. She looked peaceful -- she looked like someone who had never woken up afraid of what the night might bring. And then, standing there in the quiet, Sloan felt it. Not a thought. Not a memory nor a deduction. Something simpler and more certain, rising through her like water finding its level: she knew, with a clarity that did not feel like knowledge at all, that Beitild was a woman who had never struck another person in anger. Beitild had spent her life building things, not breaking them; she had taken in a neighbor's children when their parents died of the plague, fed them from her own stores, clothed them from her own coin, asked for nothing in return. Sloan knew the woman sleeping before her had done more good in her forty-some years than Sloan had done in both of her lives combined, and that the only crime Beitild had ever committed was existing in the path of someone else's grievance. Sloan did not know how she knew this. The understanding was simply there, as complete and undeniable as the sound of her own heartbeat in her chest. And with it came the recognition -- quiet, unwelcome, impossible to unsee -- of how often she, Sloan, had lied to herself. Every contract in the first timeline, every name condemned to die -- every time, she had stood over a sleeping body and told herself they deserved it. She had built elaborate fantasies about their crimes to justify her own actions: this one abuses children, that one kicks puppies. She had painted monsters onto strangers so she could sleep at night. But she had never known. Not really. She had guessed, assumed, hoped -- and called it enough. Standing over Beitild, she knew there were no monsters here - only a woman who had lived a good life and was about to die for reasons she did not deserve. And then, just at the edge of her vision -- a flicker. The kind of thing the eye caught and the brain dismissed, a trick of shadow or a drifting coal from the dead fire. She turned her head, a reflex she could not suppress, but there was nothing there. Just the wall, rough-hewn planks, shadows pooling in the gaps between them. She waited, counting her breaths, but saw nothing. She turned back to Beitild and there it was again -- a thread, thinner than spider's silk, emerging from the woman's chest and passing through the wall as if the wood did not exist. It was not quite light; it was not quite nothing. It shimmered faintly at the edges, a color Sloan had no name for. Sloan did not move. She fixed her eyes on a single point on Beitild’s chest and let her peripheral vision do the work. They emerged patiently, as if they had always been there but were only now allowing her to notice them. Threads or lines or something made of light and absence both, arcing from Beitild's sleeping form in every direction -- a dozen, then two dozen, then more. They passed through the walls, the floor, the window, vanishing into distances Sloan could not measure and did not understand. They were not all the same: some pulsed with a deep, slow amber; others flickered like heat shimmer, pale and urgent; a few were so faint she could barely sense them, threads of near-nothing connecting Beitild to somewhere Sloan could not see. One of them was darker than the others, a thick braided black and red string carrying a deep, steady pulse of something that felt almost cold. It passed within inches of Sloan's face. She did not flinch, just followed its arc past her and out through the wall behind her, toward the mine, toward the sea, toward something she could not name. She didn’t know how or why she reached out and plucked it out of the sleeping woman’s body. She just felt it was right. The moment it released, the thread shriveled and faded to nothing, and in Sloan’s head, the woman’s name stopped whispering itself to her. Sloan was still trying to make sense of it, still tracking the weave of threads as they pulsed and shifted around the sleeping woman, when Beitild's eyes opened. The threads vanished in a moment and Sloan was left standing in a dark bedroom with a dagger in her hand she didn’t remember drawing, staring at a woman who looked at her with the unfocused calm of someone still half-lost in sleep. "Is it my time?" The words came slow, dreamy, as if Beitild was asking about the weather. Her eyes were not quite focused. She blinked once, slowly. Sloan looked down at her; at the steady rise and fall of her chest; at the hands that lay still on the blanket, unafraid. At the threads she had seen -- the ones that connected this woman to the world in ways Sloan could not understand but could not deny. Something rose in her throat, unbidden. She opened her mouth, and the words came out without her deciding to speak them. "No. You will not die before your natural time." She did not know where the words came from. She did not know what they meant, or why they felt true, or why saying them made something settle in her chest like a key turning in a lock she had not known was there. She only knew that, just like removing the braided thread, it was right. Beitild's lips curved into a small, sleepy smile. "Okay," she said, and closed her eyes. Her breathing deepened within two heartbeats, and she was back asleep, as if a stranger with a blade in her bedroom had been nothing more than a half-remembered wisp of a dream. Sloan stood there for a count of sixty heartbeats then turned, walked out of the house, and did not look back. Next chapter Previous chapter Start from the beginning Join the Shae's Discord! Read my book! Give me a good review even if you hate it!

Not sure how this fits but I like it! Perhaps rich people are watching the proceedings through scrying and betting on the outcome. XD

Um...while it is true that Urag died in the first timeline, Aithne (just like the other Shaes) was sent back in time to begin her journey from the start. So Urag is alive and well in this new timeline. Reference chapters 56 (Splintered on the Ice) for her return to the beginning, chapter 58 (Some Necessary Conversations) for her first seeing him again in the new timeline, and chapters 60 (The Orc) and 61 (A Small Taste of Home) for her direct interactions with him (along with Colette claiming him as hers, thus leading Aithne to leave the college). Also a reference in chapter 79, when Colette says she broke it off with Urag because his dick is too big.

I'm...not sure what you mean by that. Well, naturally it is puppies and sunshine the rest of the way for her.

Aithne had stopped counting the days. Not that she had needed to count them in the first place – Merks did that for her. Eleven. She knew it was eleven because Merks knew it was eleven. His thoughts ran on a loop of self-congratulation, ticking off the days like notches on a belt of his own making: eleven days and she's still here. Still mine. I'm so good at this. He was not. It had been a mistake to compare him, even in the smallest of ways, to Sutfu. Merks wanted to be cruel, but he just didn't know how – no matter what he did, he could not seem to cross that barrier that would really let him feast in psychopathic ecstasy. He only played at being cruel; it was just unfortunate she was the toy. He wasn’t like Borkul either – Merks had no idea whatsoever how to systematically break someone’s will. In those eleven days, Aithne had been whipped and raped and prodded and spit on and every other not-really-that-imaginative thing Merks could conceive of. It hurt, of course, but that was it – there was no depth to the torture. The whippings, for instance, were not the creative, calculated things Borkul had delivered. Borkul had known exactly where to strike -- which angles produced the most pain, which intervals prevented healing, how to layer one welt across another so the entire surface of her back became a single weeping landscape of fire that never seemed to diminish. Merks just hit her. Hard, yes, and with enthusiasm, but with no more skill than a child swinging a stick at weeds. The pain was real -- she could not help crying out, could not restrain the tears that sprang unbidden when the lash caught her across already-raw flesh -- but it was stupid pain. Wasteful. It didn't teach her anything, it didn't break her in any useful way. It just hurt, and then it stopped, and then she was still herself. The rapes were similarly unremarkable. He fucked her with the same mechanical aggression he had shown in the Arcanaeum, back when he was just an entitled student playing at being a predator. There was nothing new in it, nothing inventive. Whatever the mask had taught him, he had not learned from his past self's failures. He positioned her, used her, spent himself, and then left her hanging in the chains while he ate sweets and congratulated himself on his prowess. The sweets. Divines, the sweets. He brought food for himself -- plates piled with sweet rolls and candied fruits and sticky pastries that left sugar glittering on his fingers -- and he fed her scraps of the same. She had never longed for a vegetable with such desperate, aching clarity. A carrot. A slice of cabbage. Even a radish, which she has always loathed. She longed for a simple piece of bread that wasn't soaked in syrup and water that didn't taste of the honey residue from his unwashed cup. Even Borkul had fed her proper meals -- plain, yes, but nutritious. He'd had no interest in a slave too weak to work. Yuf’s ragtag band of pilgrims had given her enough to keep her on her feet and even Sutfu had not gainsaid her food. But Merks seemed to genuinely believe that humans could subsist on sugar and spite. And then there was the smell. Aithne had hoped she would become inured to it after enough time, but if anything, it seemed to grow worse. She tried not to think about the puddle of waste beneath her, growing and spreading with each day, because when she thought about it, she could feel her stomach turn and her gorge rise and there was nothing to do about it anyway -- she couldn't move, couldn't clean herself. She could only hang there, suspended by chains that had long since passed the threshold of pain into a dull, distant numbness, and let her body do what her body did. Merks, when he remembered, would splash a bucket of water across the floor, diluting and spreading the mess rather than removing it. He did the same to her -- a cursory sluice of cold water that did nothing but make her shiver and leave her damp and miserable for hours afterward. She suspected he could not smell it - his nose, like his imagination, was simply not equipped for the task. Spending her time not listening to him -- the one positive thing she could take from this experience was that his interminable self-aggrandization had forced her to learn how to shut out thoughts and keep them out, a lesson learned of necessity lest she go mad -- meant she had only herself to hear; somewhere beneath the contempt and the disgust and the physical exhaustion, she found herself thinking. Not the panicked, circling thoughts of the early days, when every creak of the chains or flicker of the brazier sent her heart racing -- those had burned out by day three, replaced by a quieter, more deliberate kind of attention. She had time. She had nothing but time. And so, for the first moment since she had been thrown from the crow's nest of the original Jaunty Spirit, she let herself look backward. She started at the beginning -- the nest, her musings on height and cold, the crash and the careening ice, the green arm surfacing from the water -- and she walked herself through it all, step by step, memory by memory. The cave; the chains. The first time Borkul hit her. The first time he made her kneel. The first time she broke and lifted her head. She let the memories come, painful and clear, and she found she could bear them. Parts of it still stirred something in her – the crack of his voice when he commanded; the weight of him; the way her body had learned to respond before her mind had even finished processing what was happening. She had spent years being ashamed of that -- of the part of her that had wanted, even as she was being destroyed. But here, in the dark, with nothing but time and her own thoughts, she finally understood -- that wanting had not been betrayal, it had been survival. Her body had found a way to make the unbearable bearable. Besides, without it, she would never have been able to love Urag the way she did. She did not dwell on the thought -- she simply let it be true. She passed through Sutfu like a traveler passing a grotesque monument - she marveled at the sheer insanity of him. The philosophy, the careful craftsmanship of cruelty, the way he had turned torture into an art form. She had hated him with a pure, clean hatred, but she also, in a distant and clinical way, found him fascinating – a mind that bent that way was a mind she could not fully comprehend, and she was glad of it. She relived the dragon eating him with undiminished relish. And then her memory reached Urag and Aithne smiled. Merks was in the middle of a rant -- something about ingratitude, about how her suffering was her own fault -- and she didn't hear a word of it. She was in the Arcanaeum, standing in the silence between the shelves, tracing the patterns on the floor with her eyes. Well, eye. She laughed a little – she had somehow forgotten she had only had one eye. Merks noticed her laugh -- his rant cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a snarl and a question she didn't bother to register. When the whip cracked across her ribs, the pain was immediate and bright and she could not help the cry that tore from her throat. But the moment it subsided, she went back to Urag. She remembered his gruff voice and his gentle hands. The way he had refused her, at first, because he did not want to hurt her. The night she had finally convinced him, and the way he had held her afterward. The birth of their son. The way he had laughed -- laughed -- when she told him about the bookshelves. The bookshelves. The moment her life had changed. The moment the magic had come alive around her. No, it was already alive - the moment she came alive and was able to use it. The spark. Tiny, at first -- a flicker of awareness, like noticing the sound of your own heartbeat. And then the cascade. Energy building, swelling, responding to her attention like a hound that had finally found the scent. It had always been there, she just had to...let...it...in. "The true secret to magic," Urag had once said, "is that it is a limitless resource. Its potential is limited only by the imagination of its wielder." It had been his most important lesson, and the one she seemed to forget most often. Magic didn’t come from sensation. Not from feeling. It stemmed from imagination -- from pure belief that it was there, active and willing and able to be molded. Aithne closed her eyes. Merks was still talking -- she could hear his voice, distant and irrelevant, like the buzzing of a fly in another room. She could feel the chains biting into her wrists, the ache in her shoulders, the slow, grinding misery of her body. But she let it all fall away, immersed herself in that moment so long ago. She could picture the swirling energy around her as easily as she could picture Urag, and that was a face she would never forget. It was eager, almost frenzied, like a baby horker waiting for a fish. She thought of how it felt for it to enter her -- like a man, she remembered with a smile, but one she actually invited. It had felt alive and warm as it made a home in her chest. She remembered with a visceral thrill the way it had felt to give it form, to mold it to her desires. And then…the release, more cathartic than the strongest orgasm, leaving her laughing as the world crushed down upon her. She remembered and, in the darkest corners of her mind, she imagined those disparate pieces coming together, link by link, pulling together a causal chain of events that begat events that begat events. Piece by piece, she pictured them happening, in order, just as she remembered. She could feel nothing, but that didn't matter - what mattered was she KNEW it was there and KNEW what it wanted. After all, who could know better than she what it was like to let someone fill a body that felt nothing? She imagined the release; the BOOM of it shook the cave. Dust and stone showered down and the chains shattered, fragments of metal spinning away in all directions, and Aithne fell without transition face-down on the hard stone, her numb arms refusing to catch her, her cheek smashing into the filth-covered stone. She heard a scream, dim and distant, but she didn’t have strength to look. She lay still, gasping as feeling flooded back into her limbs in a cascade of firey pins and needles. She could not move - she could barely breathe. But she could feel the mana -- real this time, present, here -- and she latched onto it with the desperation of a starving wolf. The restoration spell came out a whisper, strained and barely audible, but it worked - strength trickled back, enough of it. The pain in her head eased and feeling returned to her limbs. With a grunt, she pushed herself to her knees. Merks lay against the far wall, the heavy boulder he had liked to sit on smashed into his body. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide, confused, betrayed by a universe that was supposed to have been on his side. "How?" His voice was barely a wheeze. Aithne shook her head and gave him the simple truth: "I don't know. I just...imagined." “That’s…that’s not an answer.” He seemed about to say something else but then a glow caught both their attentions and neither could speak as the figure of a woman, glowing white, eyes ablaze with kindness and dread and love and hate and the highest light of day and the darkness depths of night appeared from everywhere. She stepped toward Merks and said, "Merksandic Sardithal, your vow has been corrupted and your penance has been revoked. By the words of binding, spoken thrice freely by you, I hereby claim my due -- your soul is forfeit. You will be cast to the void to wander in nothingness." "I...what? What vow?" "The vow to serve this woman for all eternity, though worlds should fall and the heavens themselves become sundered. The one you had-have-will make at the altar to my temple 338 days ago and 2,009 days hence, though my priestess had-have-will beg you to reconsider." "But...I don't remember making any vow!" "That is of no import. The vow was made and now has been broken and your punishment will extend to the term the vow was to last." But..." Merks wheezed the words through thin breath, "...you just said that's...eternity." "So it is. Your journey begins now, Oathbreaker." And, in a flash of nothingness, the woman and her light disappeared and Aithne was left alone with her rapidly-beating heart and hanging jaw and disbelieving stare. Merks's corpse stared at nothing, mouth slightly open, as if still trying to frame a question the universe had already stopped answering. Aithne could only stare for long moments, frozen while her brain attempted to understand what she had just witnessed. Finally, it gave up and allowed motor function to resume, and she shut her mouth with a click and moved. Her arms shook and her legs would not hold her, so she crawled to him, looked in those cold eyes for a long moment, then reached up with a trembling hand and closed his lids. Then she sat back and wept. For him? For herself? For the countless versions of this story that might have ended differently? She could not say. The tears came, regardless, hot and messy and long-overdue, and she let them. Seconds or minutes or hours or days later, voices broke through the haze, urgent, sharp, spilling through a door she had failed to notice. Magelight flooded the cave, bright and blinding after so long in the dark, revealing Nyatt's face. Chyehye's. And behind them… Aithne was on her feet before she knew she had stood, stumbling past Nyatt's startled reach, barely registering Chyehye's concerned touch; crashing into Urag's chest, she wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in the familiar warmth of his robe, and wailed. He smelled like books and stone and the faint, clean scent of the soap from his suite. He smelled like home. He made a surprised sound and his hands hovered for a moment, uncertain. Then they settled on her back -- awkward, patting, the way one might comfort a child who had woken from a nightmare. He muttered meaningless words of comfort in her ear. They meant everything. Next chapter Previous chapter Start from the beginning Join the Shae's Discord! 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