Chapter Text
“If anyone here gives you a hard time, I want to know about it,” Falx Carius said to him, once. “They’ve got no place to talk, after all. There’s not a man here who isn’t being punished for something.”
“What about you?” asked Teldryn, and the Captain laughed.
“I’m the worst of the bunch,” he’d said with a grin.
He looked stern at first glance, the perfect Legionnaire, but most of that seemed to be a need to keep up appearances for his soldiers. “If I’m not twice as hard on myself as I am on them,” he said, “I’ve got no place giving them orders, do I?”
“Right, but it keeps biting you in the ass,” replied Teldryn, stopping to take a drink. “They all seriously believed you gave the order for Frostmoth to be a dry fort. You, of all people.” He gestured to the bottle of Cyrodilic brandy on the table for emphasis.
“People like to have someone to blame,” said Carius, cradling his own glass in one hand. “And when they look for that someone—well, it’s already my job to make them do things they don’t want to do. Can you really blame them?”
Teldryn snorted. “You make it sound like they didn’t have a lot of convenient help coming to that conclusion.”
Carius’ gaze drifted off without focus, seeming to settle on a point somewhere above Teldryn's left ear. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not letting Nuncius off the hook. But I can understand a man being desperate.”
“You could just leave,” said Teldryn.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way, sadly. When you join the Legion, you’re in the Legion for life.”
Teldryn never managed to get him to budge on that, but at least he tried.
They had a fairly good arrangement, all things considered. Carius had to run a fort in the middle of nowhere. Keeping morale from bottoming out was practically a full time job all by itself, so it helped to have someone he could turn to who wasn’t bound by strict rules and obligations and also one missing alcohol shipment away from mutiny. Occasionally he had to have very specific Trouble Hearing when Teldryn drew too much attention. Anyone else would have been obvious, but the Captain was known for not making exceptions.
Somewhere in the ranks, of course, there seemed to be a few people who assumed Captain Falx Carius had to be stupid. “Weapons stocks seemingly vanish into thin air? Must be an accounting error” levels of stupid. He was not, and so he asked Teldryn to look into it.
“You’ll probably need another set of hands,” he’d told him. “Go with Gaea Artoria or Saenus Lusius. You can trust either one. Artoria’s a good soldier—hits hard, works harder. Best help you could have in a fight. Lusius is less help there, but by Stendarr, if he doesn’t seem to be best friends with everyone in the fort. I don’t know how he manages it.”
Teldryn did try to talk to the fort blacksmith about the missing weapons by himself first; two people walking around asking questions tends to send up alarm bells. “Find someone else to bother, Dunmer,” was the only answer Zeno Faustus would give him. Admittedly, a very revealing answer, but not the kind of revelation he was hoping for.
Two seconds into conversation with Lusius at his side, and Zeno was saying he’d “overheard some of the soldiers” talking about weapons being stashed in the Gandrung Caverns.
“You didn’t hear it from me, though,” he added, cheerfully.
Teldryn had a good feeling about Saenus Lusius. Well, a Feeling about Lusius, but the kind that tended to lead somewhere interesting.
When they entered the caverns, the Imperial knight inside lunged for Lusius first—a grazing blow, barely enough to draw blood, but his legs gave out from under him like he had no bones. He’d gone from being a man to a sack of ash yams.
Paralysis enchantment, Teldryn noted. Nasty business, but efficient.
The solution was simple, of course: never let it connect. Whoever this knight was, he relied on paralysis too much. All of his efforts to get a hit on Teldryn—any hit at all—left him wide open. It was less a fight and more a dance that ended with a sparkblade to the gullet.
When Lusius was finally able to move, he was able to identify the corpse: Mus Roscius. They had known each other, apparently. He stared at the knight’s face in silence for several seconds before picking up the axe and slinging it onto his own belt.
“There are four other men here,” he told Teldryn, unprompted. “Two orc warriors, Mol and Mazorn. Sorian’s a battlemage. Gualtierus Spurius is in charge of the whole operation.” He patted the handle of the axe gingerly, like it was a dog that might bite him. “If Roscius was carrying one of these, chances are good they all are.”
Teldryn raised an eyebrow at him, but Lusius seemed to have forgotten how to look a mer in the eye.
For the rest of the cavern, Lusius fell back, intentionally letting Teldryn lead the way. It was hard to say if it was out of fear for his life or just reluctance to raise the axe against anyone. He kept it ready, but if Teldryn had to bet on it, his money would be on Lusius hitting an attacker once in self-defense and then legging it.
Normally he’d have a few words for a companion who left him to handle two orcs and a mage all by himself, but he did act as a distraction. No one seemed to notice he was holding back.
Gualtierus Spurius was a different matter.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” he said, which Teldryn couldn’t help but snort at.
“It would have been a good idea to start with that, sera,” he told him, brushing off some of the ash on his arm that had once been the left half of his cloak. Battlemages.
“You’re working with Saenus Lusius,” said Spurius, nodding to Lusius. “Everyone at the fort knows Lusius is a reasonable man. Maybe we can make a deal.”
He said this while holding a silver staff in his hands, so Teldryn didn’t turn away from him, but he did glance over at Lusius to gauge his reaction. Lusius’ expression was grim, and he said nothing. He just stared at Gualtierus Spurius, his hand still gripping the axe.
“I’ll get off this island,” Spurius continued. “Leave the weapons behind. I’ll even throw in a little extra if you keep it quiet. Carius will never miss me, and I’ll just disappear.” He looked to Teldryn with another nod towards Lusius. “Ask him about it. He’ll give you good advice.”
“Well, Lusius,” said Teldryn. “Guess I’ve got it on good authority. What’s your call?”
Given the look on his face, Teldryn fully expected the response to be “to Oblivion with him, he’d kill us both in a heartbeat if he wasn’t outnumbered”. Lusius shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and held it for what felt like ages.
“If you ever show your face on Solstheim again,” he said, as he reopened his eyes, “I’ll tell Captain Carius everything. I don’t care about the consequences.”
Teldryn could have been disappointed in this response, but the venom in the threat made it clear he meant it, and the fear in Spurius’ eyes was just as sincere. An off-the-records Nordic axe certainly didn’t hurt.
They left carrying the best of the stash with them, just in case Spurius had sticky fingers at the last minute. It felt a bit ridiculous carrying that much weight, but the alternative was Teldryn showing up to tell Carius “it was smuggling after all, the stash is in Gandrung Caverns,” only for the caverns to contain some corpses and fuck else. The Captain would forgive him, of course, even if Spurius had the compos mentis to clear out the corpses, too. The look on Lusius’ face would be proof enough. But Teldryn? He’d be fermenting in his own skin. Like hell he was going to show up to Frostmoth empty-handed.
When they were close enough to see the smoke rising from the fort in the distance, he dropped his pack and started running.
He could hear Lusius yelling behind him. If he had any sense, he’d stay where he was. Keep falling back, Lusius. You don’t want to see this.
The gates were destroyed. Part of the wall had crumbled. It looked like everything that could be set on fire had been, and the soldiers still left standing were dousing the fires that remained. Teldryn was too late. This wasn’t a battle in progress—this was the aftermath. The clean-up. The part where you tally the dead, move the bodies somewhere secure, and Captain Carius would already be mentally writing the letters to their families back home.
The Captain was nowhere to be found.
His chambers were empty. Asking around got Teldryn nowhere. Falx Carius was missing. No one knew where he’d gone. When he finally found Gaea Artoria in one of the halls, he got few details beyond that.
“There was an attack,” she told him, carrying another legionnaire slung across her shoulder. “Wolf creatures. I don’t know exactly what happened.” Artoria found a spare bed and carefully transferred the wounded soldier down onto it. He gave a small grunt as she did so—looked like his arm was mauled. “Last I saw the Captain, he was out there fighting.”
A chill ran through Teldryn. He swallowed and told himself to keep it together.
“I don’t think he’s dead,” Artoria added, glancing up from the side of the bed. “I didn’t see him go down, so he’s got to be alive.” Her eyes were piercing, and she had a fire to her expression; she meant everything she said.
“Where?”
“It’s got to be the Skaal,” she said. “Bunch of savages in a village on the northeast tip of Solstheim. Animal-worshipping freaks… wolves especially. They’re behind this somehow.” Gaea’s nostrils flared with righteous fury. “You’ve got to find him, Teldryn. Anyone else from Frostmoth tries it, they’re dead before they know what hit them.”
Lusius, when he finally caught up, was a little more diplomatic. “The Skaal are nature-worshippers,” he said. “I don’t know if they did it, but rumor has it they have a special relationship to the land. If anyone could find out what attacked the fort, it would be them.”
He happened to know where a skull was being stored—“Found in one of their tombs,” he said—and it took him barely any time to fetch it and bring it back to Teldryn. “Perhaps they’ll take it as a sign of good faith.”
Teldryn had his doubts about that as he took the skull and carefully put it in a new pack Lusius had found for him to use. Nords were different, sure, but generally nobody looked that fondly on people making off with bits of the dead, including the Imperial cult. Wasn’t Arkay especially opposed to that sort of thing?
In any case—maybe the Skaal attacked the fort. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the Skaal could find out who did, and maybe they were as clueless as everyone else. It was still the best lead he had, and that was better than nothing. Teldryn was going to find Falx Carius, and if that meant finding his corpse—
They’d live long enough to regret it, whoever did this. He’d make sure of that.
Teldryn’s eyes watered when he opened them, stinging like they had in Frostmoth, though he knew there was no smoke in his room in the Retching Netch. Dreams were like that: they drew no line between now and then. Two centuries might as well be two days. He knew time would reassert itself eventually. He just had to wait it out.
The soft warmth of Miraak’s breath against his shoulder helped more than he would have expected. His presence was oddly comforting. Grounding, even, like an anchor keeping Teldryn tethered to the present.
He quietly slipped out of bed and started to put on his clothes from the previous night. They’d ended up in a pile on the floor, but to be fair, he was a little too busy to be thinking about where to put it. If he hadn’t been careful to move slower for Miraak’s sake, he might well have put a tear in something. Wouldn’t have been the first time.
Miraak made one of those fretful noises a Nord will only make in his sleep—somewhere between a whimper and a whine—and he rolled toward the empty space where Teldryn had been. His arm reached forward through the sheets, seemingly trying to embrace air. His eyes were still shut; Teldryn could see movement under the eyelids, his dream-gaze darting back and forth. He furrowed his brow, a stark crinkle of worry standing between his single eyebrow and the border of his scars.
It was somewhat miraculous, Teldryn realized, that he still had that eye. The scar was severe: it was impossible to tell where his other eyebrow had been, even with the other to act as a guide. Yet the cords came to a sudden stop at the soft skin right before his upper eyelid, either going around it or fading away entirely, and didn’t resume until passing the thin membrane of his lower eyelid.
Could Restoration manage that? Teldryn wasn’t an expert, not even an adept, but it seemed possible. It would have to be a focused effort, a desperate bid to keep the eye at the cost of everything else, and he found himself suddenly imagining the moment: Miraak with half of his body charred and bleeding, holding one hand to his face, funneling the fastest healing he could manage into the socket until his magicka gave out.
Teldryn was reasonably sure that wouldn’t have improved his chances of survival—it’s the broader area that kills you—but he also knew no one thought clearly in the heart of panic. Not even Teldryn; especially not Teldryn.
He sat on the edge of the bed and rested a hand on top of Miraak’s. It was the side with the scars, and the scars on the back of his hand were thin compared to even an inch or two further down to his wrist. They stopped entirely before his fingers and thumb.
Teldryn carefully slipped his fingers underneath, gently holding Miraak’s hand. His palm was warm, soft, and completely without scar tissue.
About what he would have expected.
When he left the room to fetch breakfast from Sadri, the entire conversation took place without words—just eyebrows and mouths. This was absolutely no handicap for either of them. Sadri had a knack for handing over a bowl of saltrice scuttle and ash yam hash with the most Oh Really expression possible, and Teldryn was just as capable of dishing it back. With his eyebrows. Not the bowl.
All things considered, of course, it wasn’t the worst conversation they’d had over fetching breakfast. Embedded in Sadri’s Oh Really was a small amount of Well, I can’t complain, you could certainly do worse than Miraak.
Teldryn’s face had an equally small amount of What’s that supposed to mean?
You’ve done worse before, said Sadri’s face. He cheated a little bit by tossing in a shrug as he handed Teldryn the second bowl.
Come on, I haven’t done that badly, Teldryn’s face said, but it was not his best work. Sadri was easily able to counter it with a flat stare. Teldryn found his gaze falling to the plates: a guilty admission of Okay, maybe once.
Sadri’s stare remained unmoved as he passed Teldryn the pot of tea.
A mer doesn’t live to over two hundred without being entitled to some mistakes, he reminded himself as he brought breakfast back to his room.
Miraak was starting to wake up by the time he’d shimmied the bowls of scuttle down to the table and set the teapot down next to them. They could reuse the glasses from the mazte the previous night. It wasn’t ideal, but Teldryn had forgotten to ask Sadri for a tray, and having his love life criticized by a pair of eyebrows and a shrug was frankly enough embarrassment for the hour.
The first thing Miraak did on waking up was to sit upright in bed, rubbing his eyes. Then, with a build-up that Teldryn couldn’t help but let play itself out, Miraak went through a Process:
Eyes still half-closed, he patted his hands along the bed sheets—first blearily, seemingly to get his bearings, and then with increasing confusion, until a sudden revelation: This was not his bed. His eyes widened like he’d been lifted up and thrown into a lake, and his gaze darted around the room until his eyes found Teldryn.
The instant they found him, the tension melted away, and his expression softened again.
Teldryn had planned to eat breakfast at the table, but he found himself pulling up a chair and settling down next to the bed instead.
“Well, good morning to you, too,” he said, handing Miraak a bowl of scuttle. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a heavy sleeper?”
“Ahzidal,” replied Miraak, with absolutely no hesitation. He took a large spoonful of his breakfast before elaborating further. “The friend who was like a father.”
Teldryn chuckled. “That’s not exactly the kind of father figure I was imagining, I have to admit. A kind of mentor—I could see that. But I wasn’t expecting ‘like a father’ in the sense of having to haul you out of bed when you overslept.”
A slight, almost bashful smile took over his face for a moment. “I don’t think he ever had to go that far, but I can’t speak for before I could walk.”
Teldryn blinked at him. “Before you could walk?”
Miraak conveniently had another spoonful of scuttle in his mouth at that moment. The spoon stayed in his mouth for a bit longer than the previous one.
“Now, this might be outside the realm of my expertise,” said Teldryn, “but that sounds less like ‘a friend who’s like a father’ and more like just a father.”
“Perhaps it does,” he replied, his eyes lowered, almost staring into his bowl. “I have no basis for comparison.” Miraak looked up suddenly, as if in realization, and leaned over the edge of the bed to look at the floor.
“Don’t worry, ” said Teldryn. “They’re safe.” He gestured with his spoon to the shelf where he’d moved Miraak’s robes and mask a few minutes earlier. Miraak’s eyes softened again at the sight of them, and his shoulders loosened noticeably—Teldryn hadn’t even noticed them tensing up.
Teldryn set his bowl down, and reached over, letting one hand gently glide up Miraak’s shoulder blade and along the muscles stretching upwards to the back of his neck. This side was without scars, but the muscle underneath still felt taut and hard, and surprisingly hot to the touch—probably more than the scuttle was at this point. Teldryn started to knead his shoulder with one hand, and Miraak leaned into it, a soft groan escaping him.
It wasn’t long before the chair belonged solely to the bowls of scuttle, because Teldryn had gotten back into bed, climbing behind Miraak “to get a better angle”. Responsible? Absolutely not. But a groan like that deserved an encore.
He found himself murmuring in Miraak’s ear that it was surely better with both hands than just one. Teldryn was still talking about back rubs—technically. The heat rushing to Miraak’s earlobes from that statement alone was enough to encourage his hands to wander down further. Miraak’s breath grew heavier, and Teldryn allowed himself a grin as wicked as he felt: this was still, technically, a back rub.
There was a lot of fun to be had in technicalities, but he did, eventually, have some mercy and slid his hands around the front. Not complete mercy, of course. Teldryn stopped shy of the expected destination. He rested his fingers where he could feel the bones of Miraak’s hips, and paused to trace the length of his shoulder with a series of light kisses.
Miraak’s hands slid back to rest on top of Teldryn’s; his fingers trembled, and he shivered at every kiss.
Between this and the previous night, Miraak had a way of making even the smallest things seem absolutely illegal. By the time Teldryn made his way down to Miraak’s cock, taking it into his hands—Teldryn knew even the lightest touch would finish him off.
So he went with something much less light.
At the moment Miraak came, he had no regrets. About two seconds after, he had one: not having the foresight to turn Miraak towards the wall first.
“Fethis can probably order in something,” said Teldryn, as the both of them stared down at the fragments of the table, the other chair, and what used to be a teapot.
Fethis Alor did have the right kind of teapot in stock—which was fortunate, because Miraak had already started doling out septims from his coin purse onto the table when Fethis said he “might” have it, long before he had the time to go back into storage and actually check. Fethis didn’t have the chair or table in stock, but a custom order was simple enough, especially when all the information he had to jot down was “the kind Sadri orders for the Retching Netch”. This, too, Miraak insisted on doing immediately, by himself—his name on the order, with payment in advance.
All this Responsibility, and the embarrassment of probably being overheard by everyone in the Retching Netch. Yet when they both had to shuffle out and tell Sadri the bad news an hour earlier, he’d told them both in a level voice what to get from Fethis, but his sharpest glare had been entirely reserved for Teldryn.
Teldryn was glad he’d already put on his armor before they left the room. One of those small blessings of the overly prepared mercenary life: no one having to see your face when you’re absolutely mortified.
“I don’t normally do payment in advance for these, you know,” said Fethis, scratching his beard. “It’s usually payment on arrival. That way I don’t need to handle an invoice separately from the order, and if the whole thing goes south—well, no need to issue a refund.”
Miraak nodded. “I know. It works well for most situations in Raven Rock, but I—” He paused for a moment, tilting his head in thought. “I can make the payment now. I cannot be entirely certain I will always have the means to.”
Teldryn couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Fethis seemed equally perplexed. The previous morning Miraak had barely anything to his name, but by the evening he’d been rewarded with more than he seemed to know what to do with. That night he’d bought dinner because “while I am able, I might as well.”
“You probably don’t need to worry that much,” said Teldryn. “It’s not like it’s going to melt if it stays on your belt a while.”
With his mask on, Miraak’s expressions were back to being impossible to decipher. He seemed to be focusing intently on Garyn Ienth’s empty field for a minute before he replied.
“Would you be able to hold onto it?” he asked.
“Hold onto it?” Teldryn crossed his arms. “Miraak, I’m a swordsman, not a banker.”
“Then it is the same as if it might melt,” he replied. “Whatever I possess is only mine until he returns.”
There was, out of nowhere, a bitter taste on Teldryn’s tongue. Somehow, between the night, the morning, and a furniture-destroying breakfast, he’d managed to forget about the outlander.
“He doesn’t have the right to do that,” said Teldryn. “It’s your money. You earned it. He wasn’t even here.”
Miraak’s head lowered. “If he can access it, he will take it. He will insist it is his right.”
Fethis glanced back and forth between the two of them with an entrepreneurial gleam in his eyes. “You know, the East Empire Company are well-known for their exchange services.”
“Fethis, this is not the time,” said Teldryn. His tone was sharp enough he almost surprised himself. He closed his eyes, gave himself a second to just breathe, and turned back to Miraak. “Look, if that’s what’s worrying you—that’s not a problem. I can just clear off a shelf and let you have it.”
He wasn’t opposed to the idea itself, honestly. The likelihood that Miraak was going to overstep the offer and cover a whole bookshelf in human bones seemed relatively slim. But this context—
When he is done with me, I will either be returned to my prison, or cease to be.
Teldryn hadn’t even met this Altmer and he already wanted to shove a blade between his ribs.
Miraak had been regarding Teldryn with a tilt of his head as he made the offer. When he fell silent, he nodded in polite acknowledgement. Then, to Teldryn’s surprise, he turned and asked Fethis if he had any robes in his size.
“Robes?” He wrinkled his nose for a moment, then turned and started to rifle through his ledger. “No, sadly, all the robes I have in stock are for—” Fethis glanced back at Miraak, sizing him up briefly. “Much smaller customers. Milore, Aphia, the lot at the Temple. You might fit into some of the surplus I’ve still got from one of Glover Mallory’s orders, but—well, I don’t know. Might not be to your taste.”
For the briefest moment, Teldryn pictured Miraak wearing nothing but a blacksmith’s apron. He probably should have been embarrassed, but honestly? That was quite a good idea. Certainly deserving of another imagined minute, or twelve.
“It does not need to be perfect,” said Miraak, completely oblivious to Teldryn’s musing. “I was just thinking—it would be convenient to have a change.”
A change of clothes, Teldryn realized. Instead of one set of robes and nothing else. He felt a small twinge of guilt at that.
After they’d brought the teapot back to Sadri—because of course Miraak could not wait an hour or two, he had to bring it back right away—they went back and cleared off one of the upper shelves. They probably didn’t even need to clear it off, really. Teldryn had mostly been using it for tossing random items that didn’t go anywhere else; Miraak could have helped himself to every last blue mountain flower and lavender branch if he wanted.
Miraak carefully laid out almost the whole of his coin purse in careful, even stacks along the back of the shelf, and then stepped back to view his handiwork. With his mask off, Teldryn could see his face again, and Miraak’s single brow, softening with relief.
“It’s not right,” said Teldryn. “There has to be something we can do about it.”
“This is something,” said Miraak, and he smiled at him.