#biological warfare is all the rage these days. lorkhan approves.

[bitchwhoreofastorm]

the first blighter, following kastav

-

For three weeks now it's been the same nightmare. The dungeon, after Kastav, with all its dark wetness and pain, the ache of the gag in his jaw. He's waiting to die, in the nightmare, feeling the jagged edge of his own broken rib wearing a slow hole in his lung; he's abandoned, down there, Barfok must be somewhere nearby but he cannot feel her presence. In the nightmare he lies there for interminable time, until something-- the fear of dying alone, perhaps-- compels him to open his eyes. He opens his eyes and he's lying face-to-face with his mother, her blue irises dull as marbles, his father roaring through his heart, and he always thinks (just as he did when it happened) that someone has dyed his mother's fair hair the same colour as his, until he understands that, in fact, her head is red with her spilled blood.

Then the wetness of Kastav is the wetness of blood and the solitude is--

For three weeks now, Chemua has awoken suffocating. He spasms, he gropes around in his silk sheets until he recalls that he took nobody to bed last night, and by then he's sitting upright. He flattens his hand against the badly-mended ribs below his heart, still misshapen to the touch, and he thinks that the injury has rent his lung open before he understands that he's simply in a panic. Then it's gasping, swallowing, forcing himself through his meditations, muttering su'um, su'um as if he can use the thu'um to will himself to normalcy. Wondering, all the while, what sort of a Tongue so frequently finds himself unable to breathe.

Kastav. Kastav. One year out and the word is a shackles: Kastav. One of the most powerful men alive and he knows what it's like to be caged like a dog. Even his racing heart beats it-- Kastav, Kastav, Kastav-- louder than any meditation, until he can't bear to think it, any more than he can bear the memory of the imprisonment. Itching, restless to the bone, he rises and gets dressed.

It's cold comfort: that Mournhold is his, rightful inheritance that hardly wants him. There's a hidden passage just beyond his chambers and he knows the slaveways better in the darkness than the palace hallways in light. Still, he holds his fingertips against the wall when he traverses them, counting paces-- twenty, to a niche here, then a turn left, and a narrow staircase-- then he emerges from a tapestry, much as an assassin would, stepping into a long moonlit hallway with a broad door at the very end of it.

At that door stands a Shout on duty. He locks eyes with Chemua, long enough that Chemua can read his suspicion even in the dim; then Chemua turns and goes the other way, making the rest of his journey in the open. Wondering, all the while, whether the fear on his face shows.

Movement helps. So does being around people, though there are dwindling numbers whose company he can seem to abide. In the daytime there's always Amun-Shae, though Chemua finds her company embarrassing, he likes her patience and the wisdom of statecraft she shares. Then there's Nords: Fenja, Einhelf, Amornen, Eloja, men who are not friends because a Tongue does not have friends but who are trusted followers and overlook his flaws. The Daughters of Mephala who bed men for coin and the ale-daughters who bed a Jarl's son for favour and glory.

In the nighttime however, if he hasn't the foresight to bring someone to bed, there's no-one-- no-one but the empty hallways of Mournhold palace, and wary guards, and imagined assassins in every shadow. The ghost of his mother's blood soaking into the rug. His pace quickens--

--And then he's outside, in the courtyard, then passing through the public gardens with all their dappled shadow. The night is cold and dry, the sky clear, the stars violently yellow in their firmament. He's worn a cloak over the silken tunic and trousers, wrapping himself in it like a common thief, and it offers little warmth but compared to other places (High Hrothgar with its bitter blizzards) the city never manages to truly chill him. Chemua does not pause to check whether he is being followed. In the wake of the nightmares it is too easy to feel invisible (Kastav, dark dank Kastav where they lay forgotten) and though no handsome tall man, a fearsome Tongue no less, should ever pass through life with the sense that they are totally unseen, so he does. So he goes. Wondering, all the while, what sort of Tongue…

… Out in Mournhold proper, just beyond the gate in the Eastern district, there is a meadery adjoined to a tall wooden storeroom piled up against the palace walls. Even in these small hours the city does not sleep and Chemua finds the meadery open, its last few customers in low conversation. The barkeep knows him on sight-- there's a glass for him before he asks, but he does not take the drink, not tonight. He passes the counter, goes down a half-flight of steps and through a low wooden doorway, head ducked, down into a brick-lined cellar that smells richly of honey and is occupied by many vats.

He has to wonder about other people, sometimes. Such as Barfok, who was also imprisoned at Kastav, that odd ugly Skyrimisk woman a little older than he. Chemua doesn't like her, perhaps because there's something upstaging about her (what is the mother assassinated when he was a little boy compared to her family massacred before her eyes as an adolescent? His exile to Hrothgar compared to her years in the Vvardenfell wastes?) And still he wonders whether she, too, balks at cellars, and wakes up from nightmares every night, and wants to rip out her own heart at the thought of being caged. He suspects so. The letters she sometimes writes him are cheerful in a false, frantic way, making him suspect that his own attempts at normalcy are just as futile.

Other people, he wonders always about other people-- why not, because it always helps not to be alone. And here in this cellar he is not alone.

Chemua closes the door behind him and in that solitude he finally lets his mind turn to the chatter he's long tuned out.

The doorway he leans against groans the obnoxious groan of domesticated qethsegolle, the sluggish complaining of stone forced to be masonry. The cellar is lousy with it, a chorus of complaints that he's learned to tune out but never fully puts from his mind-- Mournhold itself is a riot of bickering, layers upon layers of architectural wrongdoing, three cities piled atop one another and none of them know how to get along. Even in the solitude of the cellar he can still hear the homesick whine of the Skyrim-pine that makes up the mead barrels, and the ecstatic gibbering of fermentation. Local honey and foreign yeast.

It is obnoxious. Walls do not mute the qethsegolle; somewhere deep below his feet is the unsettling chatter of the earth-bones the Dwemer broke here once (and mustn't they feel awful, tortured down there in the deep dark, bound, forgotten, their broken ribs wearing holes in their-- no.)

He shakes his head clear. He draws in a deep breath. He focuses his attention on the qethsegol that speaks in the corner.

We want the light. We want the light.

Behind a fermentation vat is a slapshod alchemy lab: a shelf of ingredients, a rough-hewn table stained with inexplicable substances. And atop the table are potted plants, some local and some foreign, some old and some young, all straining towards a tiny window set high in the wall. Their leaves are pale, their stalks wilting-- some of them are dying-- Chemua kneels before the table and rests his chin atop the wood, staring up through his eyelashes at the dirt-filled pots. The sad mewling of photosynthesis starved of its nourishment. Eyes unfocused, he listens to them-- We want the light! We want the light!-- the pained gasping of it, the desperation.

He lifts his chin from the table and says aloud: "Nobody is coming to save you."

He's spoken in Aldmeris but there's a note of the thu'um in it. Though the qethsegolle quiver, they fail to understand.

We grow towards the light, whimpers the notion of photosynthesis, We want the light. We want the light.

"So strain harder," Chemua tells it. "Tear yourself apart, if you want, it will come to nothing."

We want the light. We need more to live.

"Shall I carry you outside?" He rises off his knees, then sits in the chair. "Ah, but it's night-time, there's no light to be had. I'd be wasting the effort of saving you."

Barfok called him a monster. Said that his use of the thu'um was horrible-- that all he did was torture the qethsegol-- as if other thu'umcraft were based on anything less than brutal domination. Chemua himself has never considered his thu'um more than idle conversation, sprinkled here and there, perhaps, with a bit of cruel truth. It's all a moot point. He is certain the qethsegolle feel nothing comprehensible to mortals, and that if the Tongues believe they can converse, it is only because every other Tongue is as lonely as he is, starving to believe the world echoes them back. He considers this all a hallucination, his little nocturnal talks with the qethsegolle that govern plant growth, no more real than his nightmares. Still, it helps not to be alone.

When he speaks this time it's a real thu'um-- a single word of draconic that, in his tones, can be loosely translated as surrender, if surrender did not carry a connotation of peace. The desolation of something inevitably awful. Wide-eyed gasping futility. A stalk of wickwheat shrivels in on itself.

The qethsegolle of photosynthesis says, confused, Is there no light?

He still hasn't managed to find the words to get it through to them.

"There is light," Chemua replies in Aldmeris, "But not for you. You will never again taste the light, do you hear me?"

A hole in the world while the qethsegolle falls tremulously silent. It, of course, understands nothing but that single awful word. Then it starts up again, feebler: We want the light.

"You cannot have the light! You will perish down here."

We want the light.

"What for? What good will the light do you now? I've laced your soils with poison, you will perish within the week. The light cannot save you!"

We want the light.

"You may as well be dead!"

There was the thu'um in that, too, unrestrained in form, and Chemua feels reality rustle around him like a blanket. The world has noticed his heavy hand upon its flank for the briefest of moments and that awareness makes him feel naked. Deep beneath them, a pulse beats.

We want the light.

He clenches his eyes shut, turns his face towards the lamp on the wall, and sees through his eyelids the red of blood.

"No light," Chemua whispers. "You qethsegolle all died to birth this world. You're corpses. What for do you need the light? Shor sos nil. You should be rotting already."

And when he looks at the table again, he finds that they are; the air is thick with rot and the stalks of wickwheat are crimson and stunted in their pots. There is no more gibbering of photosynthesis. The world's murmuring makeup is all horror, mute bystander's gossip: the alchemy ingredients on the shelf questioning to each other whether it's true that they should be rotting, the yeast in the vats dying in their own alcoholic excrement. The cellar stagnant as a tomb.

He feels no better. This has not helped. Chemua rests his cheek against the rough-hewn table, closes his eyes, and waits like a prisoner for the morning.