#and some of them just make my skin CRAWL the storytelling is just so FUCKIN GOOD

[milkshakebun]

Can't get over the point in chapter six where Arthur has to go collect more debts for Strauss. Going to collect a debt from a man by the same name, and going down into the coal mines to find him. Talking to the foreman, and that man is hysterically yelling and laughing that Arthur's dead! He's dead, he's dead, he's worked himself to the bone trying to scrounge up the money to pay back folks like you!

It was right around the point where I was realizing how horrific the whole ordeal was, and just hearing the words "Arthur's dead!" echoing in those tunnels made my skin crawl. You're too late! Arthur's dead, you can't save him! The next best thing you can do is go find his mourning wife and try to beat the money out of her, too, you monster.

That mission was so good. It hurt. Rdr2 is so fucking good.

[dunmerofskyrim]

28

There’s breathing when I wake and I fear that it’s my own. A labour-taken rask, groping thin air into lungs gone flat and ragged as a ship’s sails tattered by storm, battle, blaze. A helpless hopeless ruin of breath, braving the pain of keeping on for abject fear of stopping.  I hold my breath til it hurts. The sound carries on, sucking parched at the air. Not my breath, I tell myself. Not my broken body.

But even when I breathe again, and breathe again, and allow myself time to breathe deep again, my lungs ache tight, half-starved. The air is hot and fuggy, close and humid near my lips, but my limbs all ache with cold. And when I open my eyes I see only a dark, almost as whole as the red-black inside of my skull. A grid of hazy gold hangs in my vision. Firelight through sackcloth. They have hooded me like a hawk.

I shuffle as best I can, trying blind with hands and legs and a writhing body to feel out my situation. A rope burns round my wrists. Another cord about my throat keeps the hood tight over my head. I’m on my side, a map of bruises and lacerations, too detailed by far. Wrists bound behind my back, my shoulders are an agony of gristle, gamy knots all through the muscle. A pleading warning in the joints of my arms. But my feet scuffle against dust, against grit, against boards and some thin layer of give. Rushes, rug, canvas, I think. My feet and legs are free.

“Sturn.”

“What?”

“Said he’s sturn. Starn to stir.”

“Oh. Looks it.”

“Looks that way an all.”

The voices native-coarse with smoke, and dust, and storms of ash. Not the subtle grit of my mother’s voice, half-faded with time. Not the mild-grained catch and drag of the mainland. The voices have Vvardenfell in them, harsher than I’ve heard on any but the oldest Dunmer of the Quarter. One’s sexless, mid-toned, with a clumsy sibilance to it: an awkwardness between teeth and tongue. Argonian maybe. The other’s female — the one whose accent runs like oil, too flat for half the syllables to hold.

“I’m questioning.”

“Yiz, is you?”

“Your reasons why. That’s what I’m questioning.”

“Got an ast, Tepa, you best ast it, aint you.”

“Him there. You left him live, Drosi. Why’s that? I wonder. I wonder…”

“Nchow. Best ast Guls than me.”

“He’s in no mood to talk.”

“Now see there you’ve catched it. Him there, he goes to kill Guls. Our Guls. And he aint do it quick. See?”

“He might live. Guls might yet live. A little fire? By my tail, Drosi, it takes more than a little fire to…” The sexless voice turns pleading, like someone telling a joke, begging anyone to laugh. “Drosi, he’s Dunmer!”

“Tccht! Stop that mouth. Stop that mouth an lissen.”

My breath is loud and thick inside the sack. The other breathing carries on, loud in the silence. A scab-dry sound, red raw.

“I know that sound, Tepa, an I’ll swear you: that’s the sound of a body dine. Slow, true, but Guls is killed all a same. Him there — if he’d of killed im quick an I’d of killed him quick as well, but things been how they is? I aint like to gie him there no more mercy’n he’s shown our Guls. Circumstances’re different. See?”

“You could’ve said. You could’ve just said it’s about revenge.”

“Proportion!” The female voice barks, hacking the words into hard flints of syllable to give them sense. A sound like her surging up to her feet. “Principle! Example… Yunstand, Tepa?”

“Yes. Guls dies slow, he does slow. Fair.”

“What else we got here? Tell me that. What else kine fairness we got but what we aint done with arn own hands?”

I’m trapped between their voices. I’m trapped between struggle and going slack. Like a landed fish can writhe and fight the air itself that drowns it, or else can wait limp for the blow to the head, the knife — feel fear, or just the hook. I tell myself: If I could see… If they would only let me see, I’d know what to do…

But footsteps come, rounding me, and a hand grips the rope that ties the sack in place. Picks me up by it, like the scruff on a cat’s thin neck. I fight, but only like a hooked fish does, useless as it tries in vain to swim the air around it. I hear the rope slither, spooling over some rafter above me. They draw me up with a heave and whetstone rasp of breath. My feet scrabble to find the floor and stand my weight before the rope chokes me. Even ground and an ache in my ankle, I stand for only a moment. And I think I know what’s coming.

“Really, Drosi? There are worse ways to go.”

“An kyner ways to wait the while it takes me to fine them.”

“Oh.”

“Juss hol the fuckin rope, Tepa.”

More footsteps over the boards, the reeds, the rug. A lighter tread. Blind, but I can smell them. A dry and dust-road smell, and something rancid, cloth gone half to rot, grease smeared over sour weeks of sweat. All that, but it’s fear that makes me gag. The brushfire boundless roaring of my mind as it speeds and smokes in vain.

“Up?”

“Uh-huh.”

They raise me. Heave by hand by heave they jerk me peristaltic upward. My feet scrabble at the ground again, hoping to somehow cling on. All that’s left is the tips of my toes, a stricken dance against the floor. They support a sliver of me in their scrabbling. The rest of my weight ropes round my neck, impending tight. If not for the sackcloth, the ropegrain would by now be stamped on my skin. A livid red cord; memory made visible, as scars are.

“No meat on him. Wouldn’t think he’d be so heavy.”

“That’d be his strugglin. Now see…”

A fist bulls into my gut. Again, I retch. Convulse. Feet slipping, I slump. A narrow pressure as my throat takes the weight of my fall. And already the air is gone from me, knocked by the punch, and my flat lungs strain for breath. The world’s turned half purple and stars show like bruises through the hot and heavy sackcloth.

The rope heaves, pulling on my head til the bones all down my back begin to grind. They are hanging me, I think. This is all, I think. Another punch, this time sharp against my ribs and jarring bone to bone.

“Blight..!”

“Carry on that way, Drosi, you’ll break your hand before you break him.”

A snarl. Drosi strikes me again. A knee. The blow cracks wet over my face and my throat convulses round the taste of blood. Then the rope goes slack and caves me down to kneel like someone at prayer. I rasp in breath as deep and heavy as the crush of my neck will let me. Breath like crying, and wrought with the tang of iron.

“Gain.”

They dredge me up til I’m dancing again. They must hit me again but it’s hard to say in surety. Afraid, my fear recoils from itself and wraps me in its warmth. I remember the temple-ruin, the nix-hounds. Fire, watching Balambal, watching the knife that emptied him. In the darkness that came then, I called fire once more. But I was hollow, quenched and cold. The fire didn’t answer. It left me to them and to this.

Pleading in the blue-black blindness, I ask it back while I still have breath. There have been stars out tonight. I’ve seen none, but they saw me; gave light out and over me, like a haze-thin fall of rain. Time has passed. A sliver skinny as a parched man’s spit, but I have back a little of my power, and a blazing will to live.

Between my bound hands a new pain begins to bloom. It’s nothing compared with the rest. A blistering burnt-hair heat. I bear it as the ropes begin to smoke.

But a singing whistling cry sounds through the night. The rope round my neck goes full slack and I collapse baggage-heavy and limp to the ground. I let the fire go from my mind, ecstatic again with air. So cold it aches on my teeth. So sweet it tastes like good water through the clotting mask of my bleeding nose.

“The nix.”

“Spooked.”

The sound of fear in their voices is sweet to me as well.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Got a mine to go see what’s spooked em you best go see, aint you?”

“Be alright with him?”

“Nchow…”

“Fine, fine… But I swear, Drosi, if I go down there and it turns out to be shamblers again…”

The sigh of stairs, ladder-rungs, some scaffold of wood taking weight. The sound rises and fades into the distance, off towards the crying nix.

The rope round my wrists is cheap, ill-made and singed now. I feel it fray open against my heat-blistered hands. But the hood still has me blind.

Drosi’s footsteps on the floorboards. My ears ring sharp for listening, trying to place her between the nightsounds, the upset of nix outside, Guls’ death-deep breathing.

“You an me now. No help for neither one of us.” She croons, stepping closer. “Reckon I’ll have to just keep things simple.”

With a loose groan I try to rise. Make a show of it, hoping to coax some new kick from her. The nix are all but wailing now in whistling chorus, seething bright as steam. I keep my hands behind my back. Try to elbow halfway to upright. Some last spark of fight for her to stamp from me.

The kick comes. A searing blue knot of pain, sudden in my gut. No warning but that I asked for it. Clenched jaw and grit teeth, I bite to pieces the grinding whimper that tries to leave my mouth. That sound’s the last of my breath, making to bolt from my belly in terror. Like a browsing buck hears the woodbreak boot of a hunter give themself away, and runs the thicket, the danger, fast as only thoughtlessness can be. But I’m less a fleeing buck, and more a wounded stag now. And I wrench free my hands, and I pounce to cling round the kick as it comes, listing hard into the pain.

If ever you’ve feared for your life and been shown some last glimmering chance at escape you’ll know it’s a strength that comes over you, almost from outside yourself. When all’s lost and some small voice says through the towering silence about to fall, ‘no, not all’. Then it comes, willing and perhaps even able to pay any cost if only it’ll carry you on. Kill what wants to kill you, and leave you still alive, howevermuch you might be broken by the attempt. As the wounded stag, so too the army surrounded. So too your storyteller, coiled blind round a leg and crawling, clawing, groping the body attached down to his own animal level.

We share the floor now, both writhing against the other like two flags in a gale. An elbow rains blows on my back. I trap an arm with a knee. Feel fingers scrabble at my face as I fight to get on top. Only the sackcloth saves my eyes from the scraping nails. Only the pain that covers me and soaks through all my flesh saves each new blow from registering as anything more than more of the same. I bear it.

I’m snarling through the hood, nose bleeding again, throat hot with blood. And under me I begin to feel it: of us two, she’s the one more afraid now. Knows she opened herself to this. Knows she had too much faith that the scales were weighed in her favour, and that now that faith has failed her. She fights for breath to scream with.

Pawing til my left hand finds jawline, collarbones, and the soft convulse of throat between them, I let one hand see for the other. I bring the heel of my right palm down crushing-hard towards it, against her throat to choke out the sound as it comes. Then like a blind man I feel up for her face, her features. Feel her muted mouth open, gnawing, trying to bite at me. Feel the rage of all her limbs as the same fear and force comes over her as has me in its hold now.

But I don’t need strength in my limbs any longer. Only focus. And to place my hands. The blade of a hard cheek under my palm. The hollow of a temple, a hairline, beneath my fingers. One last agony bursts in on my left side. I gasp the calling and feel it froth past my lips. A blaze beneath my fingertips; hot fat against my palms. I killed her quicker than she would have done for me. Still, it doesn’t feel like mercy.

In a surge almost of disgust, I push clumsy to my feet, off the body as it stops jerking. Shake and scrabble, my hands search around my neck, seeking out some knot. Still in the grips of my battle-blood, they make slow and awkward work of it. And then the hood tears from my head, and the night opens out all round me like some new dark dawn.

The room is a round attic and its roof the tall-ribbed taper of a spire, cross-raftered. Slipshod, the caulking fails here and there, and scraps of night-blue sky show through the missing tiles of it. The topmost storey of some old towerhouse, I think, boarded and with dry kreshweave dustcloths for a floor. A stone-lined hearth sits cold against one grey-plastered wall. Across from it, a wide window from floor almost to ceiling, glazed from dozens of circles and diamonds: a fit of mismatched shapes, afloat in a seamwork of black lead. The glass is murky and so old that the panes have run, distorting the world beyond them. One section of glass is hinged and open but draped over with a coarse cloth curtain, worried at the corners by a cold and seldom breeze.

Drosi lies twisted against the floorcloths. A Dunmer woman, face blistered anonymous, head scorched and smoking. The whole room reeks with burnt hair and searing fat. Poor boots on her motionless feet; just leather, loose, strapped in with strips of hide. But in a flash of jealousy, I see what else she’s wearing.

“That’s my jacket!” My voice is a choked out rasp. I crouch down by her to tug her arms from its sleeves before she starts to stiffen. “My sister’s fucking jacket!”

But as I bend that same pain bursts through me again. A wet loose wrongness of feeling, lending a hiss up out from my snarling mouth. I clap a hand to the feeling and see it come away wet and paint-bright with blood. My stomach sinks as I see the little use-knife in Drosi’s limp hand. I look down before I can stop myself.

Through both my shirts – Riftfolk, embroidered, and simple Grey Quarter kurta – a patch of blood has grown, like rust on the blade of an ill-kept sword. A tiny nick beneath my fingertips leads through the cloth and shows where the knife went in. Another hiss, almost dismay this time.

“Fuck… Fuck…”

She’s stabbed me. A shallow dip against my flank, not deep but deep enough. It aches empty, like a bruise driven straight into my side. A weak-headed feeling comes over me and I blink hard, bite the inside of my cheek so as not to swoon into it.

The night is cold, and I’m cold, and the battle-blood ebbs from out of me, like the wound itself has let it off. Emptying me out.

“It’s nothing,” I hiss with all the plea and fervour of prayer, hoping it’ll prove true. “Ghosts and bones and all the fucking gods, it’s nothing…”

But I remember Tepa now, and find that I forgot them. The nix are silent outside. No way Tepa could have left, I think, except the wind-twitched curtain. I shamble over to the wide window and move the cloth. A nail and leather-lashed ladder clings to the towerside and climbs up to this room’s window. It spans down to a balcony below, narrow, skirting round the tower. In the night-black it’s hard to say how high this towerhouse climbs.

And yet I can tell I’m in no fit state to fight or fly now. Only to hole up and hope to see morning.

I finish stripping the jacket off Drosi’s back and the knife from her hand. Trying not to look at her face, I pat down the rags she wears beneath and yank an amulet from round her neck, and for good measure the leather and strapping from her feet and calves. Then I drag her to the window. Send the body sailing doll-like out, down, into the black. And I unlash the ladder from the window, then pull it up after me. Every movement is pain, and each flash of pain brings a newer more creeping fear.