#someone remind me to finish my art of tam’s fucked up scar later

[legacyphoenixx]

Penance

A glimpse into Tamriel’s mourning over Alfira.

He’d awoken in the night to her mutilated body. Over her mutilated body. Her blood was on his hands, spilling over and through his fingers like prayer beads, as parts of the bloodstains covering the ground were arranged like a perverted ritual circle. It sickened him that he was not sickened by the sight. His blood sang in his ears instead of roared and pounded, his hands no longer shook with wanting but were instead contented with their subconscious motions. He drank in each breath of bloody flesh-smell like it was the sweetest of perfumes. The gash across his skull and down half his face no longer throbbed.

O Martyred Father… He was a mockery of his own god. The way his heart mourned the blood washed clean from his hands only drove him further. He was glad when they started to shake again, thankful that the ache returned to his head with a vengeance as his vision became clouded. Perhaps it wasn’t too late for things to return to normal. It was late. He was exhausted.

He wanted to lay back down and never get back up again. Not to die, just to lay there in his eternal torment.

The morning was worse.

The looks on his companions faces, the hatred laced in their words… Almost as stinging as the guilt he convinced himself he had, even as he confessed he had been compelled to murder her in his sleep. It was his hands that did it, after all. His sins to atone. The truth might’ve felt freeing to admit, but it wasn’t enough to save him from their anger.

The one he didn’t expect to strike at his heart as much as it did was Wyll. Even following Tamriel’s confession of his underlying bloodlust, the look of betrayal, anger, hurt, determination was… unsettling. Had he truly not believed him until now? Until his inner monstrosity reared its head and bared its fangs to the desecration of all that Ilmater held dear?

As if the monster-slaying Blade of the Frontiers-turned-devilsworn could have been considered trustworthy.

He knelt by the body, still untouched, still so beautifully serene. He retied the bindings around his wrists as tightly as he could stand it and then some. The cuts into his flesh and seeping numbness in his hands would be his suffering to bear. He refused to eat, refused to hardly move.

He felt beside himself, and not from grief. Why was he doing this? Why must he pay penance for such a lovely display? She had been in pain since her teacher had died—no, it had been cruel and unfair for him to have taken her life away like that, even if he could not remember how or why. Beautiful, familiar, but no less evil. Bile began to rise in his throat as he prayed and argued with himself in equal measure; the cords strained further. Tamriel prayed to his deity, for Ilmater to take her soul to his realm where she would feel no more pain or loss, and to Kelemvor, for his judgement to be fair and swift.

Most of all, he prayed for mercy. Mercy, not from his own dark, terrible Urges, but from the ever-watchful eye of the god who would bring wrath down upon those who would cause undue harm and death to the innocent and downtrodden. He had failed him once again. He prayed he would not turn away from him. The Urge was his burden to bear, he swore, the pain of ignoring it for the betterment of others even more so. He will endure it, for as long as it takes to bring it under control.

In Ilmater’s name.