#marcurio meeting a fellow dwemer scholar is like me in 1st year..

[bretongirlwrites]

There was a woman as if waiting for us, on the crag: a glance towards the mudcrabs, and one towards us, the both of them undeniably accusatory. It was not, fortunately, a face which was crafted for anger, merely disappointment. 

    ‘Someone,’ she said, ‘has taken my satchel.’

    ‘Satchel?’ said Marcurio, and patted his own.

    ‘About so big –, never mind. It was probably a mudcrab.’

    She came down from her perch, and looking down at the now-dead mudcrabs said: 

    ‘Nasty little buggers, aren’t they?’

    Then, perceiving, in a sideways sort of fashion, our bewilderment:

    ‘I’m sorry. That was not much of an introduction. I didn’t expect to see anyone all the way out here.’

    ‘You’re Sorine Jurard?’ – A nod. – ‘Calcelmo said we’d find you up here.’

    ‘Calcelmo?’ she asked: an eye yet roving for her satchel: ‘I didn’t think he was listening, when I said where I was going.’

    ‘We were lucky to find you at the second ruin,’ Marcurio explained.

    The satchel turned up on the edge of the water, a little further downstream, quite to Sorine’s surprise: still waxing upon the evils of mudcrabs, something about how they would take over the world before too long, she made sure that everything was still inside, and returned to speak with us.

    ‘I suppose Calcemo wants me back, to hold something while he does some experiment?’

    ‘No – not Calcelmo,’ said I: ‘Isran.’

    ‘Isran!’

    A name which did not please her much: just as Isran had guessed. – She held her tongue, asked of us what our business was with him, and with her, and we narrated it to her: the vampires, the Elder Scroll, that great castle in the mist and the woman we had abandoned to it. There was a disbelief in our own narration, and a greater one upon her face, but she was patient, and said:

    ‘If Isran thinks we’re in trouble – we probably are, I’ll give him that.’

    ‘Will you help, then?’

    ‘If he really needs a Dwemer scholar –’

    ‘He has two, now,’ said I, and indicated Marcurio.

    There are scholars who rejoice, at the meeting of like minds; and then there are others, like Marcurio, who would rather believe their interests so perfectly esoteric that none other possesses them. There was a little of the latter in Sorine: in the way she sized him up a little, as if hoping that, if nothing else, the man would not have a professorship in Dwemer crossbows.