I fell like a stone into the churning waters of the lower Lake, the breath being forced out of me as surely as being tackled by a minotaur. The impact cracked ribs and tore the wound in my shoulder and pushed the bolts in my breastplate deeper into my chest, filling my world with agony even as it was consumed by Lake Arrius. The solid impact of the water on my back nearly knocked me unconscious with the jolt alone and within seconds my mouth, nose and eyes were filled with cold snow melt from the upper Jerals. My mind was overwhelmed, the pain extraordinary and within seconds I found myself drowning as the heavy weight of my equipment and armour began dragging me to the bottom. There was nothing I could do as I felt myself lightly press into the silt where the waterfall had carved out a deep pool from the stone. My right arm was broken, several ribs cracked and lungs filling with water as I vainly struggled to rise or swim or simply breathe where there was no air to be found. I was drowning and there was nothing that I could do about it.
The vampire within me was not troubled by such trivial things as pain and lack of air. It rose up from the depths of my mind, barging my conscious self aside contemptuously and took control of my body. The surge of incredible, undeniable power that suddenly flooded my limbs forced my shattered body to rise and began clawing its way to the surface. My conscious self was left as a spectator as my head broke the surface, my left arm gripping the stones scattered around the base of the pool and despite my injuries I was hauled up onto one of the only spaces not submerged in the waterfall’s spray.
What little remained of the man that I was had been consumed by the vampire’s instincts and refusal to die. Ribs cracked, a crossbow bolt lodged in my left shoulder, right forearm snapped where I had bounced off the cliff face and a chest already beginning to swell with bruising I was barely in any condition except to lay down and sleep. The vampire however was not going accept such a fate and running purely on instinct it began to treat my various wounds.
With a sicking snap of bone and the sensation of splintered ends being ground together it forced my right arm out straight, the forearm crunching together from the muscles forcing the bones to lock back into place. If it wasn’t for the chainmail and padding underneath the jagged edges would have likely pierced the skin, but instead the arm had appeared as though I had grown a new elbow joint a few centimetres above the wrist. An intense burst of magicka set the bones, eased out the tension in the muscles and repaired the numerous severed blood vessels. With the full use of that arm returned it allowed the vampire to grip the bolt in my left shoulder and tear it out with a mighty heave, pulling the bodkin tip out with a spurt of blood.
The wound in my shoulder was burning, feeling as though a massive infection had set in or the wound had turned gangrenous. This was an obvious sign of the bolt being poisoned. There was a slightly leaden feeling in the shoulder that had little to do with the injury, and a similar one where the other two bolts lodged in my breastplate had scraped the skin. Some kind of paralytic had been applied to the bodkin tips which meant that the cultists had not intended on killing us but capturing us instead. Whatever concoction had been used however was not effective on me due to my curse, and instead seemed to merely aggravate my vampiric side even further.
Bursts of restoration magicka knitted wounds and stopped bleeding, the spells being far greater in intensity that what I would normally use due to the risk of sustaining permanent injuries and mutation. There was little time and no inclination to rest for even a second longer as the vampire merely swiped the last two bolts away with a dagger. Carefully with the point of the knife it dug the bolt heads out as best as possible to ensure they weren’t pressing into skin before beginning to rummage through my equipment to take stock of the damage.
My bow was gone; the second I had lost in just as many months which was a fact that infuriated both me and my vampiric nature to no end. My quiver was empty, my pouches and equipment entirely soaked with water and blood and most of the contents of my pack and pouches were waterlogged and ruined. Most of the tiny clay bottles that I kept in my pouches with their wax stoppers were broken and their contents useless, but a handful did manage to survive intact. One was immediately torn open, the small collection of roots poured onto the surface of the damp boulder and ground into a paste with the hilt of a dagger. The small amount of mandrake root, collected along my travels was an incredibly useful herb despite its toxicity. Used to create tonics and poultices that could cure diseases and stop wounds from festering it was also useful as a mild sedative when mixed with other ingredients. A tiny amount of salvaged Cairn Bolete was also added to the slurry before I scooped up as much as I could and rubbed it into my gums with a finger tipped with a three-centimetre talon.
I tried to ignore the fact that my body was purely running on instinct and that the vampire had fully come to the surface now. My face was elongated, every tooth in my mouth taped to a point and the muscles of my body were swollen and throbbing with a strength that could’ve allowed me to wrestle an ogre. I was hurt, angry and despite suffering injuries that should have killed me my blood was up and I was looking to murder something. The crushed paste of Mandrake Root, Cairn Bolete and a few of the other surviving ingredients immediately made its presence felt as it soaked through my gums and noticeably dulled the pain throughout my injured body.
Dripping bloody water that pooled beneath my feet with every step I made my way back up the carved staircase to the top of the waterfall. I was tattered and torn, armour hanging off me in places but I was still alive and able to fight. Sunchild was gripped firmly in my right hand, the spiking waves of pain from the forcibly set and healed forearm focussing my mind somewhat from the predatory instincts of the vampire.
There was no trace of any of the cultists or especially Viconia which was even more troubling. The use of poisoned bolts revealed that they would be taking her back to wherever they made their lair. While they may have been able to ambush us with the use of invisibility potions and spells, there was no hiding the fact that they were very lax and inexperienced in covering their tracks. Confident at my death from the fall over the edge they had not even bothered to come and ensure that I had not survived, instead simply taking Viconia and the cultist I had shot in the chest away with them.
Their foot prints and the trail of blood from their wounded or dead associate left a trail so easy to follow that a child could’ve done so. That I was suddenly blessed with senses far beyond a mortal ensured that I could’ve followed their trail by the scent of blood alone as it weaved its way into the forest on the northern side of the lakes. The hills were broken and rocky but there were hundreds of tiny cliff faces and sheer drops scattered amongst the pines. It wasn’t long before I came across the darkened mouth of a tunnel hidden away in a thick copse of pines where an ancient stream had cut into the stone.
In the darkness my vampiric nature increased, the lack of light sources suddenly allowing me the shift and weave through the shadows. Folding them unnaturally around myself like a cloak I knew I was suddenly invisible to all mortal eyes, moving across the ground almost without touching it and travelling so swiftly that only a man sprinting would have been able to match my pace. The overwhelming sense of power was intoxicating and I struggled against my own vampiric self for control, flitting through the tunnels with not even the tiniest swirl of dust from the floor or other sign of passage behind me.
A few dozen metres into the cave lights burned from torch sconces mounted into the crudely carved stone walls. Less than a dozen metres wide and opening into a rough V shape, the tiny cavern was unremarkable except for the wooden door built into the far wall, framed by the pair of flickering torches and a pair of tapestries mounted to the ceiling. Each tapestry hung to the floor, coloured the same deep red of congealing blood and emblazoned with a stylised golden sun making its way over a horizon. It was a symbol I had seen several times since deserting the Legion and it had been on most of the cultists and the unholy books written by their master. What miniscule doubt I had was gone in the face of such symbols of the cult responsible for so much death and suffering.
Alone and leaning back in a chair purposely designed to be uncomfortable a single robed cultist sat, leafing his way through a personal copy of one of the Commentaries. He was obviously not expecting any visitors or intruders and the tunnel leading to the surface had been scattered with a considerable amount of gravel in a cheap and easy method of detection. The crunching of gravel would echo through the tunnels at anyone’s approach, at least if they were mortal. I seemed to float over the ground with not a single noise announcing my presence. Between my unnatural silence the shadows concealing my movement he wasn’t even aware of my presence until it was far too late.
Some form of instinct alerted him to danger and he looked up from his book, frowning at the darkened tunnel mouth in front of him. There was no sound on any approach, no movement in its darkened depths and he glanced around the tiny cavern for the source of his unease.
When his head turned in the direction of the door to his left he suddenly found himself staring at the sight of something from the worst of nightmares. I was standing less than a metre from him, staring right into his eyes and snarling though a mouthful of fangs. From his point of view it must’ve appeared as though I had simply grown from the shadows, congealing into his sight in a way that no magicka or mortal art could’ve replicated. I towered over him in the gloom, a face elongated in a facsimile of a Khajiit, every tooth in my maw resembling that of a slaughterfish, muscles rippling with unworldly power and dripping with gore and river water. Sunchild’s gleaming beauty reflected the feeble torchlight where I grasped it in hands clad in shredded gloves, blackened ivory talons erupting from the flesh of my fingertips where the bones had simply chosen to grow and taper to a point. I was the stuff of nightmares even for a group of daedra worshippers.
With a sudden, startled cry he fell away from me, throwing his book aside and tripping over onto his back as his legs tangled into those of the chair. My appearance as well as how I had appeared as though from the air itself left him shuddering with terror.
“Where is she?” I snarled, my fang filled jaws hissing the words out threateningly.
“W-What?”
I stepped over and hunched down until my breath fluttered his hair and blood and water dripped onto his face.
“Where... Is... She...”
I could feel myself growing drunk from the man’s fear at my unnatural appearance. “She’s inside! Preparing the initiates for the latest sacrifice!”
My taloned hand snaked out and grabbed him by the shoulder, sinking my claws into his flesh and digging deep enough to scratch bone. His groans of terror were replaced with moans of agony as I hauled him up and slammed his back into one of the tapestries.
“The Dark Elf you bastard!” I spat, ignoring the fact that he was scrabbling at my hand as I held him off the ground with no undue effort. “The one you and your friends just captured!”
“The Shrine!” His wails of fear and agony were growing louder now and I suddenly found myself worrying about his fellow cultists hearing him. “She’ll be at the shrine! Ruma is going to use her as the initiate’s sacrifice!”
Weeping he slid down the wall and I pulled my talons out of the meat of his shoulder. Blood was staining his robes now, flowing between his fingers as he tried to staunch the wounds with his good arm. The feel of the power over the man was almost as intoxicating as the taste of his blood as I absentmindedly licked it from my claws.
“Daran!?” the door creaked open as another cultist came to investigate the disturbance. “What in oblivion’s name are you playing at?”
The man at my feet suddenly panicked, attempting to scrabble away from me as my attention turned to his fellow cultist. “Harrow! Help me!”
I reacted without thought, swiping away the bleeding cultist’s face with a fistful of talons and leaving him to gurgle uselessly through what remained. Both eyes, his nose, and most of his cheeks and jaw were suddenly gone from the savagery of the attack, leaving nothing more than a shattered jaw and twitching tongue as he went about dying horribly.
The other cultist; a tall Dunmer stepped through to see the sight of a nightmare flicking away the goblets of flesh and crushed eyeballs from its talons while the ruined features of his dying comrade screamed incoherently on the floor. His shock was his undoing as I picked him up, slamming his head into the rock wall and crushing his skull like an egg. Blood and brains sprayed everywhere and the corpse slumped to the ground, leaking grey matter and arterial blood from the pulp that had once been its head.
With the two cultists dead I sprang into action and disappeared past the door into the home of the Mythic Dawn. The vampire was in control, instinct fuelling every action as I folded the shadows around myself and raced through the tunnels. I was hunting now, not just for Viconia but also seeking death to those who had thought to capture and sacrifice us to a daedric prince. My vampiric sight allowed me to see in the darkened depths and hunt purely by the sound of beating hearts.
Several cultists died without even knowing of the danger the darkness held. A throat was cut, another crumpled as my dagger punched in behind her ear and another died of a broken neck after I had twisted with such force that their face was left looking over their shoulders. The poorly lit tunnels and rooms became blood soaked slaughterhouses as I cut, stabbed, wrenched and tore life from everyone in my path. Some even slaked my thirst for blood as I tore throats out with my fanged maw, sucking down their blood with wild abandon even as they struggled and tried to remove themselves from my grasp. Individuals were left lying where they had died, and in what I guessed to be a barracks or sleeping quarters seven cultists died bloodily as I eviscerated with Sunchild and my bare hands. Before the last of them fell I was gone, disappearing into the shadows and leaving a trail of carnage behind me.
Deeper and deeper into the tunnels I travelled, the crudely carved stone slowly changing into ancient stonework worn smooth by countless ages. Lit braziers and torch sconces stripped me of the protective shadows that forced me back into visibility but not reducing my lethality. Another trio of cultists died messily as I gutted the first, stabbed the second in the heart and crushed the thirds windpipe with a taloned hand all before I could draw breath. They were the last cultists between me and my destination and I had found myself in the very heart of their lair.
Thirty metres high, over a hundred long and built by long-forgotten people the shrine of Mehrunes Dagon had been hidden in the depths of the world for millennia. Shaped like a reversed amphitheatre, the smooth stone floor from the entrance rose up sharply over a pair of raised levels where the most loyal and rewarded cultists would stand. All, no matter their position and rank would face the highest level where a raised stone block was placed at the foot of a horrific statue to their daedric lord. Fifteen metres tall, horned and horrific to behold, the statue extruded a terrible potency into the air that made me pause momentarily at its sight. All four arms were raised to the sky, an axe gripped by its upper arms as though it was swinging it down to hack the block at its feet in half. Even my vampiric nature was held aback momentarily at the sight, as whoever had chosen to create such a foul statue had nearly succeeded in emulating the terrible majesty of the Lord of Destruction.
The Shrine however was filled with cultists, over three dozen stood at various places or on the ziggurat holding the statue. There was little ornamentation to the temple to their god, only a few handful of the same dawning sun tapestries scattered about and no seating for the dozen of more cultists standing at the shrine’s base. In the darkness I looked around warily, seeing that all but two of the Cultists were standing with their backs to me facing the statue and none had noticed the fact that three of their members were now corpses on the floor.
One of the cultists stood before a stone dais on the highest point of the ziggurat, holding his hands aloft and staring into the sea of upturned faces with what I could only describe as holy rapture on his face. He was tall, even for an Altmer and beside him stood a young woman whose resemblance to him showed that she was his own flesh and blood. He was bare headed, high sloped forehead and sharp angled features appearing sunken and shallow in the flicking light of the braziers lighting him. Unlike the others his robes were a deep blue, edges picked out in shimmering gold thread and clasped around his waist by a belt that showed that there was no fat on his frame. With sheer force of personality alone he held their attention as he moved with all the grace of a masterful orator, each gesture and syllable perfectly chosen and timed and never once making a mistake.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Dawn is breaking!” he cried as he stepped forth and beheld the dozens of his followers below him. “The Dragon Throne is empty, and we hold the Amulet of Kings!”
“Praise be!” The words rumbled forth through the scores of throats in the shrine, movement flickering as they each bowed their heads in supplication for a moment.
“Praise be to your Brothers and Sisters! Great shall be their reward in Paradise!”
“Praise be!” they all replied again, and I ghosted my way slowly ever closer to the turned backs of the congregation. While well-lit around the tiered layers of the ziggurat there was little light at the lower level. This allowed me to move close enough to smell the unwashed bodies of the cultists between me and their leader.
The tall Altmer, resplendent in his blue robes raised his eyes and arms to the ceiling, the sleeves falling back to reveal forearms that were strong and free of any scarring or blemishes. “Now, hear the words of Lord Dagon! When I walk the earth again, the Faithful among you shall receive your rewards: to be set above all other Mortals Forever. As for the rest: the weak shall be winnowed. The timid shall be cast down. The mighty shall tremble at my feet and pray for pardon. Your reward, brothers and sisters: the time of cleansing draws nigh!”
Carefully he turned and nodded to the young woman standing at his side. She gracefully lowered her head, holding out a satin cushion with the gleaming gold and ruby Amulet of Kings seated upon it. The perfection of such a jewel was marred by its proximity to the terrible sight of the statue of Mehrunes Dagon but it was comforting to see its presence after all that had occurred.
My eyes continued searching the room and now that I was so close to the congregation I could see over their heads and the details of what lay behind their leader’s back. The stone block at the feet of the statue was sacrificial in nature, the stains of countless lives having been lost and discolouring the surface until there was no removing the traces of such gruesome acts. With sudden realisation I saw that the block was not empty; the darkened form of Viconia lay motionless upon its rough surface.
With both the Amulet of Kings and Viconia in sight I barely heard the rest of the sermon as the darkness shifted from me and left me standing in full sight of all within the room. With their backs to me, and their leaders’ attention drawn to the Amulet no one realised that they had just gained a new spectator who’s desires and emotions were vastly different in nature.
Mankar Camoran; leader and demagogue turned with the Amulet of Kings held aloft in both hands in a sickening display of reverence that was corrupted by his allegiance to a Daedric Lord. His mouthed words didn’t reach my ears as I was filled with a terrible bloodlust and savagery, I stepping closer to the ranked cultists and roaring on the top of my lungs.
“Camoran!” I bellowed, saliva stained with blood from those I had feasted on spraying onto the backs of those standing in closest to me. At the shouted word he was cut off in mid-sentence, turning and casting his eyes downwards even as those on the lower level turned with rage on their faces at whoever dared interrupt their lord. Their anger turned into shock and terror at my appearance in their midst however, but Mankar Camoran and the young woman holding the pillow didn’t seem concerned or even surprised at my arrival. They did however move with an unseemly haste, Mankar pressing the Amulet to his chest in a closed fist and stepping away from the dais even as his followers reacted.
“Kill the interloper.” The woman screamed, pointing at me with an accusing finger.
Rushing forward the ranks of cultists mobbed me with their numbers, suicidally determined to protect their master. Most were new inductees into the order and didn’t know the rites of conjuration required to summon their daedric armour or weapons. Instead they charged, swinging fists or kicking with their feet however they could. Those more senior were suddenly encased into their black armoured robes and wielding a collection of maces and swords as they moved to surround me.
I didn’t give them a chance, as soon as woman had started screaming I had moved, tearing the throat from one of the nearest cultists and backhanding Sunchild across another’s face that left a strip of flesh hanging. There were over thirty of them in the shrine, most unarmoured and unarmed but their numbers allowing them to contend with my vampiric nature.
Ripping and tearing through the mass I killed until my arms were coated to the elbows in blood. My face was a blackened maw of fangs dripping blood and chunks of flesh and I roared into horrified faces as punches and blows were wasted on the metal plates of my armour or simply ducked away from. Using every skill and ability at my disposal, including the weeks of training with the Blades I cut, weaved, ducked and parried the mass of red robed cultists, cutting and slicing and punching Sunchild through flesh. I hacked off limbs, broke bones under my fists or Sunchild’s pommel and bit throats out in an orgy of destruction. Blows rang off my armour or sent spikes of pain into my mind as fists, feet and weapons struck home despite my best efforts to avoid the encroaching mass. Soon, I suddenly found myself outmatched by the sheer weight of numbers.
Two levels above me, Mankar Camoran stood watching the bloodshed with the first traces of fear eroding his outward layer of calm. My unnatural appearance and the way I was slaughtering my way one pace at a time through his followers was filling him with enough fear that I could smell it over the coppery stink of blood and offal that I scattered about the melee. Still holding the Amulet of Kings a muscle in his cheek twitched and he turned and started muttering such words of extreme power that his lips split and began to bleed.
Terrible and gut-wrenching, the words that he spoke were not those intended for mortal throats or for mortal ears. A few of the lesser willed cultists fell back shrieking as their ears began to bleed from the power of the incantation. Despite the damage that it was doing to his own body as he coughed and wept blood not once did he falter or mispronounce a word. In a crackle of discharged energies, a tear in reality exploded into life before him, a glowing maw of fire and devastation kin to the towering portal outside the walls of Kvatch.
Roaring wordlessly at the sight of the leader of the cult backing away from the raging melee with the Amulet of Kings in hand I threw off the pair of cultists trying to tackle me to the ground and ripped a dagger from its sheath. Even with my enhanced speed and strength there was no way that I could cross the distance between us and stop him from getting away, so instead I reached back and threw the dagger with all of my vampiric strength behind it.
The dagger crossed the space between us in a flicker of movement that was almost too fast for the eye to see. He stood before the portal and had turned briefly to gloat just as ten centimetres of steel punched into his blue robe and impaled a lung. The sudden look of extreme surprise and agony that crossed his features was almost enough to remove the sense of failure as he fell back with a sharp cry of pain, twisting through the burning portal and disappearing from sight. With a muted thunderclap the portal imploded, disappearing without a trace and taking not only the leader of the Mythic Dawn but the Amulet of Kings with it.
At the disappearance of Mankar Camoran the rest of the cultists blindly surged forward once more, seeing the opportunity to stop me in the split second that my guard was down. I felt the solid thump of a body into my spine as one tackled me, another wrapping her arms around my legs from her position on the ground after losing a leg to Sunchild. Within a second I was on the ground, slipping in the viscera of a disembowelled cultist and feeling the full weight of half a dozen land on me in their unthinking ferocity.
Punches and kicks rained down, and I tried desperately to fend them off. My right eye suddenly went dark as one punched me in the face and one of the screaming cultists had both hands around my throat as he attempted to throttle me to death. Sunchild was lost to grasping hands, and soon the constant battering was finding the softer portions of my armour and were being made felt despite the chainmail and padding covering my body.
Using my vampiric strength and taloned hands I fought and struggled, writhing under the mass and doing everything I could to break free. A clawed digit sunk to the knuckle in an eye socket that left its owner writhing and shrieking with jelly sliding down his cheek, and another stumbled away clutching at a ruined hand while I spat out fingers. The cultist straddling my chest and attempting to strangle me screamed as I reached up with both hands and pulled down hard, clutching both sides of his head in clawed hands and sinking my teeth into his throat. With hot blood pulsating down my throat I lost all sense of the blows becoming more and more pronounced and targeted, simply digging my teeth in deeper and sucking greedily. Even when the combined efforts of the group managed to break my hold on their shrieking comrade and pry him away from my thirsting mouth I continued drinking.
The blows kept on coming and I cowered behind my armoured forearms, attempting to protect my face from the flurry of attacks. Another cultist slammed down hard onto my chest, wailing as she threw punch after punch at my face that for the most part harmlessly bounced off my armoured vambraces. I was losing and as my vampiric strength was taxed to the breaking point I suddenly I felt my body shift and change my body in ways I never knew possible.
Similarly to how I had wreathed myself in shadows, I felt my a strange sensation flood my limbs and torso from my core to my skin. The sensations of skin breaking under fists and feet and the gripping and pulling of those trying to grasp at my clothing suddenly fell away and I lost all sense of pressure at being trapped under a baying mob. Instead my body, clothing and armour was sucked away into itself before exploding into a mist like off a waterfall. The crowding cultists fell over themselves with surprise and confusion as I suddenly became incorporeal, travelling around and through them as a cloud before condensing into my true form at their backs and outside of the press.
Their surprise, while short lived allowed me to regain the offensive and I tore into them with wild abandon. Arms broke, legs snapped and faces were crushed as I punched and battered my way through them with my vampiric strength. One of the armoured acolytes was thrown backwards as I kicked him in the chest with enough force that I could feel his heart explode from the power of the blow. Another dropped shrieking as I snapped a knee, before grasping her by the face and shoulder and pulling her head off with a roar of effort.
Their numbers were dwindling now and a handful of the lesser willed individuals fled screaming into the darkness of the shrine, deeper and further away from the entrance. Those who remained fell to my assault, dying horribly as I killed and ripped souls screaming from their bodies and gorging myself on opened throats.
Several times I exploded into mist, my strange new ability proving exceedingly useful but being joined by a second one as I found my body shift again. This time I found myself transforming into a mass of bats that chittered and squawked in the darkness, the horde of their furred bodies bearing down a pair of shrieking cultists and leaving them drained of blood. I flitted between forms, turning aside blades and attacks or shifting into mist or furred bodies that allowed killing blows to be wasted on nothing.
It was not without a price however, and as the last of the robed and armoured cultists slid to the ground with bloody runnels for a face I was even more badly battered and wounded than before. My legs shook, arms trembling and all my strength was being thrown into not falling onto my knees or lapsing into unconsciousness. The paste on my gums had long lost its potency since being washed away in mouthfuls of blood, and pain was brought thundering back into my mind with all of its lost strength. Every bone felt cracked, bruising had erupted across my skin and there was not a part of me that wouldn’t be red-black from the haemorrhaging. A rib or two were broken, some teeth cracked and my right eye was fully swollen shut and blinded. What I had soon realised was when my body shifted into bats, any of those that were struck down or injured would transform into open, weeping wounds or other various stigmata upon returning to my true form.
Bleeding from my injuries and caked in the blood, gore and viscera of the cult I staggered my way up the sloping stairs to the top of the ziggurat where the one of the last of them stood.
“Where did he go?” I growled, looking into the uneasy eyes of the Altmer woman who had given the Amulet of Kings to Mankar Camoran.
She paused for a moment, while not afraid of my unnatural appearance it was impossible not to feel some form of fear or unease after so many were left dead by my hand.
“My father has gone to Paradise.” She said arrogantly, not letting her nervousness of my widening snarl or increasing proximity show anywhere but in her eyes. The smell of her fear though was almost intoxicating as the call of the blood in her veins.
“Then how do I get there?”
Her laugh was honest and completely at odd at the situation she found herself in, the sheer level of her arrogance digging away at me like a needle under a fingernail. “A beast such as you will never enter Paradise. My father, and the Amulet are far from your reach.”
Quicker than she could react I grasped her around the throat, picking her from the floor in one hand and drawing her in close enough that I could smell the lavender perfume of her flesh. “I’ll find a way. When you see him, tell him that I’m coming for him.”
There was a moment of hope flash across her face as my grip lessened around her neck and I placed her back on her feet. Rubbing absently at the reddening mark around her porcelain neck she stared at me confusingly for a second, trying to contemplate what was going on even as I grabbed her with both hands and bit her face off.
Still clothed in the flesh of a vampire my face was still elongated, strengthened and filled with teeth sharp enough to cut through leather. My jaw was impossibly strong and could open far wider than normal which made it simple to bite down hard enough that I sheared away a considerable portion of her cheeks, nose and lips before she could react.
Gurgling and screaming through a ruined face all that was left was her chin and lower lip and she fell away grasping at my armoured legs in agony. Her wide open eyes jutted from a face that suddenly lacked all flesh and muscle where the bones of her skull had been scoured by the passage of my teeth. Blood sprayed and bubbled from the horrific injury, flooding her mouth even as she went about dying a drawn-out and painful death.
Chewing slightly and swallowing I turned and walked away from Camoran’s Daughter as she died messily on the top of the ziggurat, ignoring how she tried crawling after me in desperation. For the next few short minutes I hunted down the last of the cultists where they tried to hide in the depths of the shrine. With nowhere else to go and unable to escape with me between them and the entrance they all ended up meeting their ends on the stone floor with their life-force spreading out in pools about them.
By the time I had returned, Camoran’s daughter was well and truly dead where she had attempted to pull herself up the side of the stone dais. There was no one else left alive except for me and the unmoving body of Viconia where she lay at the statue’s feet. Only the sounds of bodily fluids leaking out of shattered corpses broke the silence as I moved over to her, kicking the dead Altmer off the edge and listening to the body smack wetly with a sick sense of satisfaction.
Viconia was semi-conscious. The bolts having punched into her and flooding her veins with the paralytic that had left her comatose and barely awake. The shafts had been cut away but at least one that I could see still had its head lodged into her ebony flesh. I couldn’t risk trying to heal her or pulling the head out in my current state, and after such a fight I doubted I had enough mental strength to be able to control whatever restoration magicka I could draw upon. Her wounds weren’t bleeding however, which meant that the only chance that we both truly had was to get to Cheydinhal or to anyone who could help us.
I careful bundled Viconia into my arms and began to carry her out of the death-strewn caverns and into the sun. Her weight was almost enough to topple me, and without what little vampiric strength I still had I would have easily fallen face first into the gravel road and not woken.
Instead I concentrated solely on placing one foot in front of the other, staggering and swaying and refusing all of my body’s desires to simply lay down and sleep. For most part I strode on with heavy footfalls, dragging the bottoms of my boots in the dirt and only opening my good eye every few dozen paces to ensure I wasn’t going to stagger into a rut or off into the forests. Every step was agony and for what felt like years I plodded on aimlessly, following the track and moving towards the city a dozen kilometres away.
After what was easily an hour of slow travel I came across a group of figures ambling down the road. From what I could see through the blurriness of my left eye there were nearly twenty of them, all clad in mismatched armour and clothing and not a single one appearing to have anything in common with the others. As they turned towards us I despaired at the thought of facing bandits, as such numbers and in my current state meant that I was incapable of offering any form of resistance.
A towering brute of an orc, clad in heavy plate armour from the depths of his homeland strode forward with a mace over a shoulder and a collection of goblin heads hanging from his belt. Motioning for the others to stay back he strutted over, raising a hand in greeting and an eyebrow at our appearances.
“Hi friend.” He grunted, casting an appraising eye over the two of us and appearing genuinely concerned. “You look as though you need a bit of help.”
My laugh turned into a cough and I shrugged slightly despite Viconia’s unconscious body pressed to my chest. “You could say that.”
Turning he gazed over the group at his back and began snapping orders. “Keld, Elidor. Get some ropes and make a pair of litters. I want some volunteers to carry them as well.”
He gestured to a handful of individuals who signed wearily and handed over their weapons to their comrades as the Orc “volunteered” them to help us. Soon I was able to place Viconia onto a stretcher made from a collection of ropes, a cloak off someone’s back and a small collection of spears and polearms that made the frame. Another appeared and a powerfully built Nord with a braided beard helped place me onto it.
“We’ll get you two the Cheydinhal, don’t you worry.” The orc followed alongside my stretcher, giving a sharp whistle to the group to continue on. The stretcher-bearers grunted under our weight but soon the group of us had set off down the road.
His tusked grin seemed massive and reminded me of a closed bear trap. “I’m Burz.”
From my position on the makeshift stretcher I weakly shook his hand with a grip barely capable of crushing a flower. “Kaius.”
“Good to meet you. Don’t worry about anything for now; the Fighters Guild will get you back to town.”
