Chapter Text
Every time Brit returned to Whiterun, she found the thought of leaving again ever less appealing. Her latest adventure had lasted only three nights, and yet, as she waved to the gate guard and trudged up the path to Breezehome, she ached for a seat beside the fire.
There had better be a fire. It was nearly dusk, and Lydia always had a knack for knowing just when Brit was about to walk through the door. She would have stoked the hearth and started a pot of venison stew, and if she had not…well, Brit could hardly stay mad at Lydia. The woman was as gentle as she was loyal, always with pleasant word and a sword resting nonchalantly at her hip.
When Brit pushed through her front door, the fire was crackling and an aroma of leek and garlic warmed the air. Potato soup. She would have to ask for venison tomorrow.
“Welcome home, my thane.” Lydia said with a nod. She stood over the hearth, and the firelight gave her cheeks a rosy glow. There were days when Brit thought of marrying her, and there were days when Brit wondered if perhaps she already had. But she couldn’t bring herself to send for a priest of Mara, not when she spent weeks at a time on the trail of dragons and bandits and ne’er-do-wells and not when Lydia deserved better. And besides: it wouldn’t be proper for a thane to marry her housecarl. No matter how rosy her cheeks were.
“The soup smells good,” Brit replied. “Will it be ready soon?”
“I can serve it now, if you wish. I had a feeling you’d be back tonight.”
Brit smiled. She shook out of her helmet, then removed the rest of her armor piece-by-piece, wincing every time she had to twist her right shoulder, which screamed—if shoulders scream—whenever moved to a particularly bothersome backward angle. Slaying dragons was no chore for the hero known as dovahkiin, but three nights spent in a bedroll on the plains? That Brit could do without.
The jarl would want to see her tomorrow. Never a day went by in Whiterun without someone or something getting into the sort of trouble that only the dragonborn could sort out. But tonight Brit would eat two bowls of soup and sleep until well after dawn, and tomorrow she would curl up in her favorite chair with a book of riddles and no intention of moving one pinky-toe—at least until the jarl’s couriers came knocking.
The bed creaked as Brit flopped onto it, and her eyelids fell heavy like a dragon-scale boot that you just kicked off for the first time since Morndas.
Then the world jerked.
Brit was not on her bed. She was on the floor. She hadn’t fallen; she didn’t ache any more than usual—which was to say, she ached a lot but not an incriminating lot. The stone floor pressed cold against her cheek, and Brit did not have a cold, stone floor. Hers was made of wood. There was a fire. She had a pile of wool blankets with a bear skin draped over top of them. And, by the gods, her house smelled of leek and garlic, not—she wrinkled her nose—lampblack and rotten fish.
“I have a task for you, Dovahkiin.”
Brit rolled onto her back. No, she had not fallen out of bed, and she was not on the floor of her bedroom. The sky was starless and sickly green, and hovering an arm’s length beyond her face was a bubbling pit of eyes and black tar.
The Telvanni wizard Neloth had examined Brit once, after her defeat of Miraak previously in this year that felt a thousand years long. He had cupped her chin and twisted her cheek and asked her a dozen questions about frivolous things, and then he had announced, with a triumphant tip of his too-pointy chin, that she showed none of the tell-tale signs of Daedric magic. No black spots in the corners of her eyes, no strange words rolling off of her tongue, nothing to worry about here. Would that it had been so.
No, all that had transpired since the first time Brit opened that black book—since she first set foot in Septimus Signus’ outpost in the Sea of Ghosts—had sealed her fate. The jarl could send her after dragons, the people of Skyrim could ply her with requests, and Brit could wish with all her heart to live a quiet life in a quiet home and retire, at life’s end, to the halls of Sovngarde. It would change nothing. Hermaeus Mora had declared himself her master, and it would take more than spotless eyes to convince him otherwise.
“What do you require,” she mumbled, seeing no reason not to oblige the entity keeping her from her blankets. The largest eye softened and widened, as if pleased.
“There is…a game to be played. A wager between the princes of Oblivion. You will go to the Deadlands, where Mehrunes Dagon, the prior victor, will assign a challenge. And I will be watching.”
Brit wrinkled her nose. This sounded an awful lot like something that required getting out of bed and forgoing that book of riddles by the fire. She pushed herself to her feet, and the swirling eyes flitted out of her way.
“It will be done,” she replied without the slightest hint of enthusiasm. “How?”
“Like this.”
Brit stumbled, and when again she found her footing, she stood on the sandy floor of an arena. The sky was wildfire red and thick with smoke, and a dozen or so mortals of different races stood around her. Some even looked presentable. The same could not be said of Brit; she was wearing only a flimsy nightgown, her feet bare and her hair in unseemly tangles.
“Representing Apocrypha,” a great voice boomed, “Brit Snowstrider, Dovahkiin.”
The grandstands cheered, and Brit acknowledged her announcement with a chin-tuck that might have passed for a nod. High above, a man twice the size of an ordinary human sat upon an iron throne, his lip curled into a sneer. He had pointy features: pointy ears, pointy chin, pointy horns sprouting from his pointy brow. An extra pair of arms unfolded from behind his head and received a cup of dark wine from a servant in embroidered robes. He swirled it before sipping.
Mehrunes Dagon, I presume.
“Representing Evergloam,” the voice boomed again from someplace opposite Dagon, “Karliah, Nightingale.”
Brit glanced around but didn’t catch a response. Nightingale. The title sounded familiar, though Brit could not remember where she had read it.
Then, beside her, a swirl of violet dust coagulated into a male bosmer. He was short, even for his kin, with round, rosy cheeks and tawny hair slicked back with a glossy sheen. His armor was of a make Brit had never seen before, studded as it were in amber plates. And those eyes—so gold they were almost red, and glistening like those of a cat with a mouse caught by the tail.
“And finally, representing the Shivering Isles: Aril Thorn, Hero of Kvatch.”
The bosmer bowed, turned to face his competitors, and, when he met Brit’s eye, gave a wave and a cheery smile. She didn’t know him. But the Hero of Kvatch—that story she had heard. He was the man who had spared the world the Oblivion Crisis in a bygone era. To think—a face like that? Some hundreds of years down the line? Elves. Brit acknowledged him with a tilt of her chin.
Mehrunes Dagon raised all four hands, and the arena fell still. He stood, grinning, statuesque, while the silence and sweltering heat beat upon the crowd.
“For this challenge,” he began at last, “I have decided to bring back an old favorite—a scavenger hunt.”
He said those last two words with the tone of a conman speaking to a wide-eyed child, and the arena burst into laughter. If this was a joke, Brit and these other ragtag mortals were the punchline.
“The kingdom of Skyrim,” he went on, though Brit bit her tongue at the not-so-accurate designation ‘kingdom,’ “has witnessed the return of dragons and the devastation of vampire hordes—it’s a fitting setting, don’t you think?”
Again the crowd cheered.
Mehrunes Dagon brought another sip of wine to his lips. “Thus the stage has been set; four of my servants wait in Skyrim, and it is the duty of each champion to find all four and receive their seals. But as always, there is a catch.”
As always. Dagon grinned the wicked sort of grin that one might imagine only a Daedric prince can grin, and whispers rustled through the grandstands.
“It seems a shame that it is always the champions running around while we, mighty princes watch from afar—don’t you think? Well, I propose something a little more fun. My rule is this; each champion must be accompanied by a Daedric prince in mortal guise, or their challenge is forfeit.”
Brit clenched her jaw, and the crowd, once cheering, erupted into…excited?...chaos. Sparks of fire, frost, and lightning lit the grandstands, and that spot in Brit’s shoulder began screaming again. She rolled it back and forth, sucking in breaths through gritted teeth. Amidst the rancor, a cloud of ravens flew to Dagon’s throne. From it leapt a feminine figure draped in void black, her facial features long-drawn like those of an elf but with a distinctly human pallor. She took the Prince of Conquest himself by the throat.
“This is ridiculous!” she shrieked. “It…it must be against the rules!”
Green fog oozed from the arena wall below, and with it came an odor of bile and blood-blackened vomit. “Oh no, Nocturnal,” the fog spoke, and out crawled a dragon with brass scales. “There are no rules against this. I do, however, believe one should be added; such a contest violates the spirit of our game. Shall we put it to a vote?”
The sound of shattering glass echoed from behind, and a horned man with a bottle of wine in each hand sidled up between the champions. He gave a few points and winks to his favorites, took a swig from the left bottle, then the right, then said, “C’mon now, Noxie, Peryite—it’ll be great! I haven’t heard an idea this fun since—hic—since forever.” He raised his bottles triumphant in a gesture that would have been inspiring had he not lost his footing doing so.
The bosmer in the amber armor—Aril Thorn, as he had been introduced—shook his head in a panic. “The champion and the prince together? That’s, well—”
“Quiet, mortal,” Dagon boomed. He turned his snarl between the princes gathered in his presence. “As it is, the matter has already been decided; the rules stand as they are. Any prince who does not wish to participate may choose to forfeit, but, per the rules, that means sacrificing their champion to me in recompense.”
The raven-cloaked woman glowered, then tucked into her hood, vanishing with her birds. The dragon tipped his chin in acknowledgment, and he of the wine bottles raised another sloppy toast.
Mehrunes Dagon clapped his hands. “Then, if there are no more disputes regarding my contest, the challenge will begin tomorrow at Skyrim’s dawn; each prince has until then to conjure a mortal aspect and join their champion in acceptance of my terms.
“Now. Let the games begin.”
The prior night’s events had all been a dream—Brit declared it so.
Never before had she been summoned to Apocrypha without touching a black book, and the idea of a grand tournament between the champions of the Daedric princes? Ridiculous. Furthermore, anything that Mora may or may not have said afterward about how ‘unfortunate’ the terms were and how he would, nevertheless, abide them, had surely been her imagination. Nonsense, hogwash, and balderdash. She rolled out of bed with a lazy yawn, stretched from her toes to the top of her reach, and pulled on a loose-fitting, grey dress.
Lydia knocked at the bedroom door.
“My thane?”
“You may come in. What is it?”
Gingerly, Lydia pushed through, then darted a glance back toward the main room of the house. “I’m sorry to bother you, my thane, but a friend of yours is here to see you. He gave the name ‘Wood.’”
Brit rubbed her temples. Wood. The Woodland Man.
Yes, it had been real. All in a night’s work for the Dovahkiin. Brit really had been summoned to Oblivion, and really was to leave immediately on a quest with unknown stakes for an unknown purpose, merely because the god who considered himself her master had requested it. A god who was now here, in her living room.
“I will speak to him.”
Mehrunes Dagon had ordered the other Daedric princes to take on a ‘mortal guise,’ though Brit had not spared a second to think about what that meant. She was, therefore, stopped at the top of her own stairs by the sight of a perfectly ordinary nord-ish man in mage’s robes. His features were unusually delicate—almost feminine—without a beard or marks on his face of any kind, and his hair was long and wavy black, reminding one of a slick of writhing tentacles. He had been gracing a finger over the meager collection on Brit’s lone bookshelf, and he paused to regard her with a stern nod as she continued, cautiously, down toward him.
“You are awake,” he remarked. “Will you require time to prepare for our journey?”
This wasn’t the voice he usually used. Still agonizingly lax, but higher pitched, more colloquial. More human. The hairs on the back of Brit’s neck could not decide whether this made him more trustworthy or more terrifying.
“You’re leaving again?” Lydia asked. “So soon?”
Regret knotted in Brit’s stomach, along with a desperate urge to say ‘no’ and crawl back into bed. Nevertheless, “Unfortunately,” she replied. “In fact, could you please go buy me a parcel of dried meat from the market? This could be a long trip.”
Lydia took the hint. “It will be done, my thane.” She bowed and gave ‘Wood’ a curt nod as she departed.
The room was quiet, save the muffled bustle of the street outside. Specks of dust floated in the morning sun that filtered through the windows.
“Well—” Brit started, only to be interrupted by puff of flames mere inches in front of her nose.
Out popped a tiny creature that looked, as compared to a dremora, the way a kitten would look as compared to a sabre cat. It stood only a foot high, with tiny, taloned hands and the stubs of horns jutting from its forehead. It landed on the floor, then produced—from another, smaller puff of flames—a scroll.
“We take this as your acceptance of the terms of Mehrunes Dagon’s challenge,” it squeaked. “The challenge begins now. You may summon me at any time for clarification on the rules or to check”—it unrolled its scroll and held it aloft—“this map, which marks the locations of Lord Dagon’s seals.”
It was a map of Skyrim. Four red circles had been drawn on it: one over Markarth, one over Solitude, one over Riften, and one, in the far corner, over the island of Solstheim. Brit’s lip twitched. Solstheim was not, technically speaking, in Skyrim.
After a few seconds, the tiny creature nodded and disappeared the same way it had arrived.
“There we have it,” the man who was—Brit had to remind herself yet again—Hermaeus Mora said, folding his arms behind his back. “Did you say you needed time to prepare?”
“Yes.”
They stared at one another a few seconds more, and Mora raised an eyebrow. His eyes were green flecked with brass, and Brit was certain, in the pit of her stomach, that she had seen them floating somewhere among the myriad others of his usual form.
“That is,” she continued, “I would like…one day. I need supplies. And a bath. And I’ll have to send a message to the jarl letting him know that I will not be in town for…however long this will take. Then tomorrow we will depart at dawn, and”—she mouthed the names of the circled locations on the map—“head for Markarth. Then Solitude, where we can hopefully find a boat willing to take us to Solstheim, after which we will find our way back to Riften.”
“It is a fair plan.”
Brit’s bit her tongue. Should she be letting him make the decisions? This new face of his kept her off guard, unsure how to behave. He looked so…normal. Poshly normal, but normal nonetheless. The kind of man she would meet at a soiree in the Cloud District, or up north at that snooty Thalmor Embassy.
Mora curled his lip, as if amused. “You need not be so tense, dovahkiin. Your…initiative…pleases me. I will allow you to lead the way in this endeavor.”
Brit’s tongue would be chewed to mush by the time they got to Markarth. Nothing got past him, not at all. No, this journey would be, easily, the most awkward and unpleasant of Brit’s life—and that very much included the week she spent pretending to be interested in Esbern’s old war stories while they marched from Riften to Riverwood.
“So,” her eyes darted about the room and fell, with a pang of regret, on the book of riddles she had intended to read. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow.”