Chapter 1: Ripples in the River
Chapter Text
Thrēnus Ad Sōla Arbor
Act 1:
Threnody
"…and that voice made me think. Perhaps the most painful and horrifying feeling to mankind… must be the death of their children."
Reiner, Corpse Knight Gunther
—
He was sinking.
It wasn't such a bad feeling, really. He expected pain, perhaps. And panic, that would set in as the hasty gasp of air in his lungs ran out, if it hadn't already from seeing the streams of red escaping his body into the chilly water through a dozen stab wounds. Instead, though, he just felt light and numb.
On second thought, that was probably from the blood loss.
If he wasn't currently submerged, he probably would have laughed. After everything, this was how the respected Valerus Maro died: bleeding out in the water under the Katariah, if he didn't drown first. Already, he couldn't move his arms or legs, and even if he could, he didn't have the strength to swim against his armor. All he could do was drift and wait. The assassin hadn't even had the decency to kill him properly.
It was cold.
The frigid iciness of the waters of the Sea of Ghosts was permeating through what little insulation his skin and soaked apparel offered. He already couldn't feel his fingers—if he didn't look at them, he couldn't even tell he had them anymore. He could tell his joints were growing stiff.
Darkness swam at the edges of his vision. Something that resembled sleep—except with a far deeper darkness behind it—beckoned at him, encouraged him to close his eyes and give in to it.
Maro relaxed into the water and let his eyelids, already heavy from fatigue and oncoming death, fall shut. His lungs were starting to burn; the urge to inhale was building. Really, he didn't mind dying. It's not as though he had any plans to continue living, after his planned resignation, anyway. He regretted that he wouldn't be able to warn the agents onboard the Katariah that one of the assassins had survived, but they were good men. They'd figure out what was afoot.
He surrendered to the sea. It wouldn't be long now.
Maybe he would get to see his son again.
Suddenly, the world pitched under him. He gasped as a rapid current swept him into something hard—and immediately regretted it, as he was still underwater, and now the cold sea was invading his throat. Blindly, he reached out, latching onto the stone he'd hit with a burst of newfound strength. Coughing, spitting out water that for some reason lacked saltiness, he dragged himself onto a shore.
"Commander! Are you alright?" That was… Arcturus?
What a ridiculous notion. Arcturus was dead. Then again, so was Maro, now. Well. It seemed they ended up in the same afterlife, then.
Maro finally opened his eyes, and was greeted by a wholly unexpected sight. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn't the familiar river canyon that now greeted him. At least it explained why the water didn't taste of salt, but—what was he doing in the river under Dragon Bridge?
"You jumped in after that assassin. The one who—" Arcturus cut himself off, and grimaced. "The one who killed your son."
Did he ask that previous question aloud? He must have, judging by Arcturus's response. And—
Maro sat up. "Gaius," he croaked out. His throat burned a little. Probably the water.
"I'm… I'm sorry, sir," said Arcturus. "The assassin got away. We couldn't find any trace of them."
Maro just nodded, numbly, as he got to his feet. He ignored Arcturus's protests behind him, that he shouldn't be getting back at it so fast, that he might be injured. He stood, and pondered, and tried to gather stock of the strange situation he'd found himself in.
It was Tirdas again, that accursed Tirdas the 26th of Last Seed, the day that was and probably would forever be permanently etched into Maro's mind. It was the day he'd bid goodbye to his son, who was embarking on what was supposed to be a routine mission evaluating the security of the hold capitals before the Emperor's arrival.
The hooded Argonian crossing the eponymous bridge was perhaps unusual. But the beastfolk weren't exactly all that rare in Skyrim, and the road through Dragon Bridge was the only one leading to Solitude.
Maro began growing suspicious when the Argonian walked right into Gaius, with a sort of deliberateness to his gait. It was unmistakably meant to provoke the man, but there were very few people willing to intentionally pick a fight with an Imperial agent in uniform.
But a Dark Brotherhood assassin, Maro had realized too late, would be among that number.
He'd called out in warning as Gaius made to scold the Argonian for such a careless action. But the assassin was far faster—Gaius barely even had a chance to register what his father was suddenly so alarmed about.
Maro would never forget the image of the compact, lithe figure smirking at him with those gloating violet eyes and that fanged grin, as the assassin slipped behind Gaius with a dagger in hand, wrapping one arm around the agent and bringing his blade to bear with the other. The commander had thrown himself desperately across the space between them, but he wasn't fast enough, and there was nothing else he could do but watch—he could only watch as the assassin cut open a gaping line across his son's throat. Arrows flew from the hold guards as Maro shouted the alarm, but it was too late; the Argonian grinned and tipped himself over the edge of the bridge, still holding Gaius's body. Maro lunged forward, but his grasp was met by air: far below, his son had already disappeared under the currents of the Karth along with the man who had killed him.
Maro had jumped after them, diving into the river himself. The first time around, he'd given up once he'd reached the place where the Karth met the Frost, where he'd realized he was hopelessly outpaced by an Argonian in water.
A guard would find his son's body washed up near Solitude's docks that evening, along with a letter implicating him in a Stormcloak conspiracy to kill the Emperor. Maro never believed it. It was obviously a Dark Brotherhood plot to undermine the Penitus Oculatus. But his insistence still didn't save Gaius from dishonor in death.
Reliving the worst day of one's life wasn't a defining feature of any of the afterlives, though, as far as Maro knew. That left two other likely possibilities: this was an illusion, or this was the delirious dreams of a dying man.
Narrowing his eyes, he brushed off the mild fussing Arcturus was still doing, and started up the riverbank back toward Dragon Bridge.
"...sir?" Arcturus was trailing behind him, and evidently wanted an explanation of some sort, at least.
"My apologies," Maro murmured, "the fall appears to have disoriented me. I'll be fine."
As he approached the town, he surreptitiously examined his surroundings with a sharp eye. If this was an illusion, he could already tell it was an impressive one. Maro knew Dragon Bridge well, and so far, wherever this was, it looked exactly like the town he remembered.
He stopped in front of the outpost.
"Go on without me," he told Arcturus. He'd just jumped into a river, and was soaking wet, and he'd just lost his son. If all this was even real, that is. He needed some time to think, and to determine if he was hallucinating.
His subordinate nodded. "Understood, sir."
And then Maro was alone.
He decided to test for himself, definitively, whether this was all some elaborate illusion, or perhaps a vision conjured up by a dying mind devoid of blood and oxygen. He needed to know.
Beside the road just north of Dragon Bridge, where the Karth cut away from the mountain, was a precipice drop down to the river's shore. To this cliff Maro walked, right along the edge. Visages weaved from spellwork couldn't change the actual physical terrain around Maro. And it was impossible to die in dreams—if none of this was real, the drop would be harmless.
If, somehow, it was, though…
At least he'd see his son again. And he'd be lying if he denied that part of him wanted that. He'd forced himself to carry on, last time, because he still had a duty to the Emperor and unfinished business with the Brotherhood. But now he knew how that story would end. He shivered a little as a memory of sinking in cold seas resurfaced for a moment—but only for a moment.
No, nothing waited for him there but yet more failure. For Valerus Maro to die at the bottom of this cliff before him, didn't really seem like that great a loss. His worthless life in exchange for a chance to speak to Gaius one more time. It sounded more than fair.
For a moment, he pondered: was this what being suicidal felt like?
He took a breath, and let himself fall.
Suddenly, the world pitched under him, and—
This was familiar.
With a powerful stroke upward, Maro broke the surface of the water, and found himself in the River Karth. Again. But that death-by-falling-off-a-cliff was absolutely real.
(And by the Divines it had hurt. He'd rather not do that again.)
Arcturus was there again, too. For a second time Maro waved off his subordinate's attention before hiking back up to Dragon Bridge, a repeat of the previous… lifetime? Loop? He wasn't sure anymore. But what was certain was that he most definitely had done this all before.
He glanced up at the sun's position in the sky, reckoned the direction of north, took note of the approximate time. Just in case he happened to die again, which would give him a chance to gather more information. Then, from his home he retrieved a set of clothes and armor that wasn't soaked through. He would at least be somewhat presentable for what he was about to do.
He rode north, to where he knew his son's body would be found.
There, he hid his horse and crouched unseen, lying in wait. It's been a long time since Maro was an agent in the field, conducting infiltrations and espionage, but that kind of skillset never really left a man. Patiently, he watched the riverbank for hours, as the sun dipped below the ridges of Mount Kilkreath, casting the land under that dusky shadow not quite dark enough to be true sundown.
His waiting paid off just a few minutes later. There was a splash in the river as a dark tail broke the surface, and then the Argonian was right there, carrying a sack over his shoulder. Maro already knew what was in it.
The assassin dropped Gaius in the mud. Maro charged, and only moments later he had the Argonian skewered on his sword. It was insulting how quickly the fight was over. It was easy, so easy. And that hurt, because despite that, Maro had still failed to protect Gaius from that same assassin.
What caught him off guard was how raw it felt to see his son again. It's said that Time will heal any aching heart, but in that moment, it certainly didn't feel like it. Because Gaius was right there and his memory telling him it had happened over a month ago meant nothing in the face of the sight of his son lying motionless in the mud, the line across his neck still as red and fresh as on the day he died.
Because in this illusion, or world, or timeline, or whatever it was, that day was today. And maybe Maro should have known better, but by Oblivion, it felt so visceral and it felt so recent and it felt so real, like all those days of rigid compartmentalization and buried hate and spiteful planning had bled away from his memory, and now all the grief and anguish and rage had come crashing down around him again. He felt as though he'd been given the memories of the weary old veteran who drowned under the Katariah, but he himself was still the man who had lost his son just that morning.
He'd never really managed to move past Gaius's death in the first place. He buried himself in plans of vengeance as a way to keep himself together, but he didn't even have that, now. He was probably losing his mind—actually, given that he'd walked off a cliff earlier to test a time loop, he was fairly sure of that much. He didn't know what he was supposed to do now. Go after the Dark Brotherhood again? Because that had ended so well last time. Resign his post, and try to 'come to terms with it' and 'move on' and all the rest of the advice he once ignored in favour of his vengeance? He didn't think he even knew how to leave Gaius behind. He didn't think he was even capable.
How could a parent ever learn to bury his own child?
"I was going to gift you the family sword once the Emperor departed safely," Maro whispered into the wind, for ears that would never hear him. "Passed down through generations of defending the Empire. You'd have more than proven yourself worthy of carrying it, had you not—"
He couldn't finish the sentence.
Only the soft flowing of the river and the faint breeze responded. Logically, he knew that any conversation he tried to make was doomed to be one-sided. He could almost imagine the way Gaius would have reacted, telling him, in that fondly exasperated tone of voice he used when he thought Valerus was being a little too parental but was grateful for it nonetheless, "Father, you know I favor gladii!" Gaius was always down for a little friendly banter. And although it wasn't Valerus's strong suit, he'd try to oblige, because if Gaius enjoyed it, who was he to say no?
But that was lost to the elder Maro now. He could say everything he'd wanted to and never got a chance to say to Gaius, but there would be no reply. There could be no reply.
He knelt down by his son, and clasped one cold hand between both of his own.
"I'm proud of you," he said, and was met by silence.
"I miss you," he said, and was met by silence.
And he allowed himself to weep.
—
That's where he remained until the sun went down. That's where he remained until the guard from Solitude found him, still at his son's side. If he could have, he might have stayed there forever, like it would somehow give back some of the lost time. Not that forever would ever be long enough. Because even then, even at the end of forever, he would still be a father who had to say goodbye to his son.
It was only after the priest had given Arkay's rites and Gaius was laid to rest in the catacombs under Solitude that it struck Maro. The assassin hadn't planted the incriminating letter—Maro hadn't given him a chance. Gaius was buried with honor, as a courageous soldier who gave his life in the line of duty. There was no accusation of a Stormcloak plot. Something was different this time, and yet, time continued to flow; the world went on.
Which meant… Maro had the power to change things. To change the past. It didn't take him much time to realize the implication, because of how much it would mean.
He had another chance—
To save his son.
Did he dare to believe? The reasonable thing to do was to not hold out hope. Maro learned a long time ago that optimism was a good way to end up disappointed. It happened time and again in the past, in what he was accepting was a past life.
And yet. And yet, he couldn't help but hope. No—rather, he almost had no choice but to hope. Because, truth be told, the possibility of changing the past of this timeline had always been lingering in his mind, ever since the moment Maro woke up on the river and realized where and when he was. And how could anyone reject such a chance, however slim it may be?
He had to take it. He had to try. Because after the sacking of the Imperial City, after he lost his wife, he'd sworn to protect his last remaining family and he'd failed in that responsibility the first time and he'd do anything for another chance.
Next time, he'd swim faster. If he could just close the distance between himself and Gaius before the currents swept them too far, then perhaps, perhaps, there was a window of time where it wasn't too late. Perhaps, there was a world where what was left of Maro's family could be together.
—
For the record, Valerus Maro would like to note, he was not 'directly orchestrating the circumstances of his demise' because he wanted to. He was fairly certain he'd regret it whenever the remembered pain of bones shattering decided to come back and haunt him. He didn't want to die, much less die repeatedly.
This chance was just one he could never reject.
—
So he dove. And without fail, dying continued to reset his life back to that morning and that hour, always the exact same moment in time. He'd practically memorized that stretch of the Karth, with how many times he'd swam through it, with how many times he found himself doing it all again.
He just
wasn't
fast
enough.
—
Dive.
Swim.
Fail.
Fall.
Repeat.
—
Again.
Again.
Again.
—
Maro had long lost count.
—
Yet another failed attempt to add to the countless previous ones, and Maro finally stopped to actually think about what he was doing, because he was getting nowhere and he did have enough cognitive presence to recognize that fact eventually.
He sat near his home, atop the rocks that formed the eastern bank of the Karth, looking down at the river. Far below him, the waters rushed on steadily, as they always had and as they always would. It seemed to him more and more now that the course of his life was in a similar state, flowing down its predetermined path. Perhaps, like a boulder in a river, Maro could only shift the little details of the way his future would flow, but could not change its ultimate destination.
Was Gaius even alive when the Argonian pulled him over the edge? Even if Valerus swam fast enough to catch up with his son, would Gaius survive long enough for rescue? Would Gaius make it to a healer?
The more Maro thought about it, the more he realized there was nothing he could do. He'd seen it for himself, that first time, how deeply the Argonian sunk the dagger, how torrential the blood flowed from the cut vessels in his son's neck. Gaius was probably dead before he hit the water.
So Maro gave up. He didn't throw himself from that familiar cliffside once again, to reset the loop and try again once more. Instead he simply trudged back up to his home in Dragon Bridge and retired to his bed. He was far too exhausted to try to think, about why he was repeating his life, about what he had to do to stop it. That issue could wait until tomorrow.
He shut his eyes and allowed sleep to take him.
Instead, though, he found himself in a dark void. There was solid ground, of a sort, beneath his feet, at least. He brought up a hand, straining his eyes through the darkness—he could only barely make out the shape of his fingers, and that was while holding his hand just a few inches from his face. He extended his arm, and his hand vanished into the blackness before him.
So it was dark, obviously, but still not completely devoid of light.
The silence around him was broken as distant, steady wingbeats pulsed through the otherwise still air. There was a flash of bright scales in the distance, quick as lightning, visible somehow for a split second through the blackness. Maro reached out blindly in front of him, into the void.
Something met his fingers. He wrapped his hand around a round, flat surface, cool like steel. Cautiously, he pulled the object toward him, until he could resolve its form in the scant radius of illumination around him. He was holding it by its top face: an hourglass, within which the sands swirled around endlessly, circles upon circles.
He stared down at the timekeeping device, watching the tiny golden grains spin suspended in their little moment of eternity. The message was clear. He was back in his past. He could change its course, insofar as he didn't die. He was sent back again, to the same point, in the event that he did. Like something was rewinding his time.
And he was dreaming of an hourglass, and of scales and powerful wings.
Akatosh.
Chapter Text
Akatosh's connection with the Empire of Tamriel is a well-known one. He was the one to grant mortals the Amulet of Kings, crowning St. Alessia the first Empress of Cyrodiil. Centuries later, when the Dragonfires faded in the closing days of the Third Era, the Dragon God lent His power to man once again, allowing the last of the Septims to permanently seal the gates of Oblivion.
All of this was to say, Akatosh had some level of interest in the fate of the Empire. And, apparently, Akatosh wanted something with Maro, though he couldn't possibly fathom why. It wasn't as if the Divines were known to single out mortals to order around, the way Daedric princes did. And yet here Maro was, in an artificial dream, and there was an infinite hourglass in his hand and the sounds of a dragon flying somewhere in the distance. But why him? What exactly made him stand out among all the other people in Nirn? He was just a washed-up old veteran who failed to—
And then it hit him.
His job wasn't done. He lost his son, but there were still people he had to protect, people he had a duty to. Vittoria Vici. The famous chef, Balagog gro-Nolob. And, of course, Emperor Titus Mede II himself. He knew they would be the next targets and he remembered everything about how they were murdered. That ridiculous game of catch-up he'd had to play when the leader of the assassins came to him with a deal was unnecessary now, now that he'd been given all the cards in advance. He had everything he needed to truly put an end to the Dark Brotherhood, once more with feeling this time.
It wasn't lost on Maro, in that moment of realization, how incredibly unfair it was that out of everyone the Brotherhood had murdered as part of their conspiracy, Gaius was the only one Maro apparently wouldn't have a chance to save. Immediately, Maro's newfound sense of purpose took on a sour note.
He glared at the darkness of the dreamscape. "Why?"
The question disappeared into the space, consumed by the void.
"Why," he asked again. "Why not Gaius? Why everyone else, except him?"
"Answer me," he snapped, he demanded, he pleaded, to no avail.
"Why won't you let me save him? Why won't you let me save my son?!"
The question left his throat a roar. But only moments later, it faded into the endless silence once more.
Maro fell to his knees and slammed a fist into the ground halfheartedly, as his anger burned out and left behind again only the desolation of loss.
When he opened his eyes the void of eternity was gone. Beams of gentle morning sunlight were filtering through a crack in the east window's curtains and landing on his face. This was his bedroom. He'd dreamed away the night.
His pillow was wet with tears, and he'd apparently lashed out at something in his sleep, because the dagger he normally kept on the end table by his bed had been swept onto the floor. Thankfully he'd managed to avoid cutting his hand on it, at least.
Maro ran a hand over his face, staring at the ceiling, and sighed. He didn't want to get up.
How nice it would be, to lie there forever. To simply fade away until he was forgotten, alone in this empty house.
But Akatosh wasn't going to let him rest, at least not now. He knew that well enough after the first fifty deaths that didn't stick around. He had to finish the mission he'd been entrusted with.
Maro finally rose with a groan. If he recalled correctly, the next victim was Vittoria Vici. Killed to lure the Emperor out, to force him to clean up the mess created by them. If he could stop it—he just needed to stop it. If the wedding went as planned, there would be no reason for the Emperor to sail out to Skyrim at all.
He could tell his agents were trying not to stare—and failing—when he walked into the outpost.
"Sir." Arcturus saluted. And then he dropped his tone, asking, "are you all right?"
"Just fine," he replied gruffly. "We have a job to do. I'm going to get ahead of them this time."
"Yes, sir." Arcturus looked skeptical, but didn't press.
Maro stalked over to the map of Solitude on his desk, stabbing a finger at it. "They're going to go for the wedding. The target will be Vittoria Vici."
"Respectfully, sir… how do you know that?"
Hah. Arcturus was sharp as ever. Which was why he'd hired the man.
"I was never working with them," he replied, in almost a growl, to assuage the suspicion creeping into the Captain's mind. For a moment he recalled his 'partnership' with their leader Astrid. That didn't count. Technically, it hadn't even happened yet.
He decided not to mention it. What was just one more failure of character?
"I got the information off the Argonian," Maro lied. "He gave up the plot hoping I'd spare him. Wretch."
"I see. We'd better make our preparations then."
Thank the Divines for Arcturus still thinking highly of him.
"We'll post guards at every entrance to Castle Dour. Implement a strict no-weapons policy; search every attendee. And assign an agent on the stairs to the balcony. The assassins want to kill her as she gives her planned speech. If anyone besides the groom tries to follow her up there, arrest them."
"I'll send a missive to Solitude," said Arcturus. "To inform them that we'll need their guards."
"Good." Maro straightened from over the desk. "We have a week. Let's get this right. Gaius—"
His thoughts stuttered to a halt. He'd spoken without thinking. It—it'd been so long since he made a mistake like that.
"Never time," he muttered. "I'll guard the stairs."
Thankfully, his subordinates knew not to broach the topic of that momentary lapse and the reason behind it.
Maro looked at Arcturus. "You know what to do."
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Maro could hear the tightness in his own tone. "I'll leave you to it."
—
Maro went off duty early. He had to get out of the outpost—he couldn't bear to stay there, where he saw fleeting phantoms of Gaius in the corner of his eye, where all he could notice were the empty spaces lingering between the occupants' everyday routines.
Home, as Maro was just now learning, wasn't much of a reprieve.
He nibbled halfheartedly at a baked potato in lieu of a proper lunch and tried not to stare at the empty chair opposite him. He wasn't really succeeding. In another timeline he had eliminated all such distractions in his house, transformed it from a home to just another workspace. He glanced toward the back of the house, the room there that was Gaius' little library, the room that Valerus had emptied out a lifetime ago.
It had worked at first, when he still had a case to work on. But then, after the decoy Emperor and the ambush and the destruction of the Sanctuary, after he thought he'd finally ended things, he didn't even have anything to remember Gaius by.
This time he just shut the door to the room. Moved the extra chair to the basement. Out of sight, out of mind, and this way he'd still have something left of his son after it was all over. If he found a reason to carry on existing, in the first place.
He could already imagine the awards and accolades and celebration and fame that would come with wiping out the Dark Brotherhood. He'd probably be hailed a hero or something ridiculous like that. He could tell some of the rookie agents at his Outpost already had a mild case of hero worship for him. And Arcturus certainly gave him more respect than he deserved. He'd tried to dissuade such attitudes for a while, but eventually gave up when that started becoming more counterproductive than anything (what actually happened was 'humility' got added to all the other reasons his subordinates looked up to him).
Becoming famous would admittedly pose a bit of an inconvenience for going somewhere away from civilization to quietly die in isolation. The price of success. But he'd managed to 'escape' the Imperial City and move to the relatively more quiet Skyrim—though, granted, part of that was because the Oculatus needed an outpost in the province what with the Civil War liable to pull the Emperor out there in the near future along with the presence of the last Dark Brotherhood sanctuary in Tamriel, and Maro had volunteered for it knowing he was almost guaranteed the position. Still, if he could disappear from the public eye once, he could do it again.
Well. That was a problem for future Maro.
The wedding started out uneventful. Vici and Snow-Shod greeted their guests with joviality. Disgruntled loyalists on both sides of the civil war grumbled and argued in hushed tones. So far, no suspicious figures had tried to gain entry to the venue, and the only weapons that had been confiscated were the typical iron or steel daggers most citizens carried for self-defence.
Things were going a little too well.
Maro wasn't exactly one for peaceful and uneventful happenings. In his line of work, those tended not to exist. But no matter how many times he scanned the crowd, everything just continued to look… mundane. The bride and the groom's parents argued, a ragged-looking beggar helped himself to the food and wine, an old priest made their way into the Temple of the Divines… even the younger Penitus Oculatus agents on duty seemed to be relaxing a little, also affected by the upbeat mood. He made a mental note to warn them about the dangers of complacency when the time for post-mission debrief came around.
Again: going too well.
Or maybe he really was just being overly paranoid.
"Father, you worry too much. I'll be fine."
Maro felt his jaw clench imperceptibly. His grip tightened on his sword. The memory sounded as clear as if Gaius really was right there behind him.
"You're being paranoid. I'm inspecting security, not charging off into battle. There's not a lot that can go wrong."
The last time he allowed himself to naively believe everything would be fine, it led to him losing the most important person in his life. The last of his family. It was the greatest mistake he'd ever made, and he's made a long list of those in his life. It was a mistake he would never allow himself to make,
ever,
again.
Stop it, he told himself. Get it together. He was on a mission—what mattered was the here and now. Focus—analyze the crowd. Why did he feel so off-kilter?
The old priest. That's what was nagging at him. Sure, the duties of the Temple of the Divines didn't stop just because of a wedding, but weddings were the domain of Mara and this one had been scheduled well in advance. There should be no reason for a priest to arrive in the middle of the event when they had enough information to arrive before it started, not to mention the current time of day was generally unusual for a priest to be arriving…
Unless it was a disguise. If it was, credit where due, it was a creative one.
He wanted to investigate, to be sure, but that would involve leaving his post guarding the stairs to the balcony. And if he was wrong, that would leave Vittoria Vici exposed. Was that a risk he was willing to take?
No. Leaving his post was too dangerous.
But he could pull another agent on the ground. He glanced around at the other agents in the area, names and details and service records floating through his head. Except, as he was about to find out, he wasn't going to get a chance.
There was no warning.
Out of the blue, he heard it. A crash. Then, screaming. Maro sprinted up the stairs and slammed the door open. And before him was a mess of blood. Asgeir was in the corner, looking shell-shocked. And Vittoria—
Crumbled stone that was once a gargoyle was piled on the balcony. The blood soaking the balcony seeped from where the decorative architecture had fallen right where Vittoria Vici had just been standing.
No.
It couldn't be.
He thought he'd accounted for every possibility.
Maro whirled around, his gaze shooting up. And there, up on the parapet, stood a dark-cloaked figure, with an unmistakable red handprint emblazoned on black robes. The sight only confirmed his fears: this was no accident. It was an assassination.
"He's on the walls!" Maro roared down to the agents on the ground level. It only took a moment for them to scatter for every nearby access route to the walls. For his part, he briefly considered descending and using the entrance from the Temple of the Divines. But he quickly dismissed that plan—it was going to be too slow. The assassin had already disappeared from sight.
Maro clambered onto the collapsed gargoyle, ignoring the slick of blood under his hands as he made the leap. It only took him a moment to spot the assassin, who had just rounded a corner to the right. He broke into a sprint, charging after the killer in a frenetic chase, and finally, they crossed paths with Arcturus coming the other way. Maro pulled his greatsword triumphantly as Arcturus shoved the assassin against the high walls surrounding this section of the parapets.
"Got you."
"I'm getting too old for this," the assassin rasped, as he ignited fire over his hands.
Maro ducked as a wave of heat went flying over his head, raising his weapon defensively. He sidestepped another jet of flame as he closed the distance with carefully-positioned steps.
"That all you got?" He taunted as he slid aside to narrowly avoid a fireball. The assassin's attention was all on him—good. Maro resisted the urge to glance at Arcturus—no sense risking giving away a perfectly good flanking ambush.
Sadly it wasn't going to be that simple. The assassin was sharp enough in a fight to avoid those kinds of simple tricks. Maro was prevented from closing the distance by another jet of fire, which gave the mage the opening he needed to also force Arcturus to back off.
The mage grinned wickedly. By the time Maro registered the increase in the air temperature he could tell he'd felt it too late.
"Arcturus—!"
He'd hardly reached his subordinate when the wave of fire rushed outward from the assassin. He threw Arcturus around a corner, to cover, but before he could follow, the spell caught up with him.
Maro was helpless against the force of the shockwave as it threw him into the air, clean over the parapet walls, and he plummeted toward the waiting ground below. He had some experience in these matters. He knew he would not survive the fall.
Well, shit.
Time to go again.
Notes:
Aaaand I'm already falling behind on my lead time, in terms of how much I've prewritten. Oh well.
Chapter 3: Iterative Step
Chapter Text
Maro was getting sick of the river. Of all the moments in his life to rewind to, that had to be attached to one of the most inconvenient circumstances to be in. It wasn't enough to taunt him with his son's death: he also had to be wet and miserable every time he reset. Not to mention the Karth was damned cold.
But then, none of it would be an issue if he just managed to stop fucking dying. Sounded easy enough in theory, and yet it was proving surprisingly challenging.
An unsteady gargoyle. Who could have expected that? But then again, in hindsight, it was a pretty serious safety hazard, having that hanging above a balcony like that. Perhaps this was an argument for Maro to extend his paranoia to include the structural stability of the buildings around the people he was protecting—he knew nothing about the topic, but surely he could just ask an architect to teach him the basics.
At least it taught him a new vulnerability at the event. Unbidden, his mind latched onto that and started spinning out even more vulnerabilities: it was silly of him to not station guards on the parapets at all; he's seen the floor plans of Castle Dour, he knows there's a way up there from the Wells District; even if the assassin hadn't gotten access to the Temple of the Divines he could have gone up that stairway with a bow and, well, that would be the end of that. Stupid of Maro to overlook it, really. And the catacombs under the Temple— the Wolf Queen Potema's wing of the catacombs had been sealed off, but not destroyed, and no one really knew where those tunnels led or whether there was another entrance. Maro didn't put it past the Dark Brotherhood to invade a resting place just to get to their target.
And now he had half a mind to put the entire city under temporary lockdown, all over a wedding.
He said as much to Arcturus, quietly, looking for a bit of a sanity check, after the rank-and-file agents had gone off duty and it was just the two of them in the outpost.
"That's a little drastic," was what his subordinate thought of that plan. Well. That wasn't a wholly unexpected reaction.
"I know. I just can't stop thinking about everything that can go wrong. This is the Dark Brotherhood we're dealing with. You've seen what lengths they'll go to."
"I understand, sir, but I think you're being a little paranoid."
"I understand, but you're being paranoid," the voice that haunted him whispered over Arcturus's words.
Maro winced. Arcturus noticed.
"I saw that. Respectfully, sir… are you alright?"
"Gaius—Lieutenant Maro said almost the same thing the last time I ever spoke with him." Maro ran a hand over his face, and considered allowing himself to show a moment of weakness, but instead he said, "I'm alright. I appreciate the concern."
"Shit, sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"You're fine." Maro waved a hand, don't worry about it. "There's a reason I'm telling you this. I know posting security around all of Solitude is untenable. I wasn't seriously considering it."
"Are you sure you don't want to take leave?"
"No—no." Maro shook his head, giving the answer immediately, as something deep inside him revolted at the notion, because: "I need to see this through."
Arcturus's expression was sympathetic. "None of us are expecting you to just—carry on like nothing happened, you know; no one will think less of you for taking leave. We're all in mourning, but obviously it can't possibly compare to what you're going through."
"The best thing I can do for myself right now is to personally see that every single assassin in that organization is put down," Maro replied, in almost a growl.
Arcturus pretty visibly didn't believe that statement, but backed down nonetheless. "...if you say so, sir. I'm just worried about you—I think we all are; the others just look upon you too highly to say it."
"You look upon me too highly," Maro pointed out, drily. "But here you are."
"Matter of opinion, sir. I think I look upon you exactly as highly as you deserve," Arcturus retorted and cracked a grin. "I'm also your second. It's my job to advise you."
"I'll take your advice into consideration. But I'm fine."
The look Arcturus gave him was sorrowful. "No. You're not. And saying it enough times won't make it true."
Part of Maro recognized Arcturus was right. Yet, irrationally, he couldn't bring himself to even entertain the thought of taking leave.
"Yeah, alright. I'm a fool out for revenge, a fool who can't let go. But it's all I have now, so just let me have this." Not that Arcturus had the authority to stop Maro from taking any missions. Maro was the ranking officer here, after all.
Arcturus just sighed, and said, "…get some rest, Commander."
—
This time there was a watch posted over the parapets surrounding the wedding venue. Maro stood by the loose gargoyle, resisting the urge to pace. Already, other agents had discovered something else alarming: a bow and a set of arrows, hidden on the walls across from the balcony—a place that would have had a perfect line of sight to the bride. The number of contingencies the Dark Brotherhood had prepared to ensure the success of their sickening mission was incredible… and only made Maro more nervous that he'd missed something, that there was still some way they could pull it off.
But fortunately, in the end, there weren't any elaborate plots or convoluted schemes. The Brotherhood went for the gargoyle again, and thanks to Maro, the assassin didn't get anywhere close. The moment the crouching figure rounded the corner and entered Maro's line of sight, the commander was charging with weapon at the ready.
The assassin—a green-scaled Argonian—glanced back and forth between Maro and the retreat, and then finally drew a sword of his own and met Maro in combat. Their blades clashed with such force that the sound of impact rang loud enough that the other Oculatus agents were sure to notice. And from the shouts of surprise coming from the wedding venue below, Maro could surmise his assumption was correct.
This assassin was certainly more adept with a sword than the old mage or the black-scaled Argonian. Probably his weapon of choice. Maro parried another swipe, using the larger weight and momentum of his greatsword to knock the assassin's blade aside, and followed through with a lunge that forced his opponent to backpedal.
Fortunately, Maro had the upper hand already due to weapon choice: he was able to utilize his range advantage to keep the assassin from closing. He continued to press forward, maintaining the initiative with an unrelenting series of jabs and strikes that kept the assassin on the back foot. He had enough battle sense to know it was taking all the assassin's effort to effectively block the strikes from Maro's more force-carrying sword. Eventually he managed to back the assassin into a corner—the same one he and Arcturus cornered the mage in last turn—but this time no other agents had made it up there yet. Maro knew if he turned the corner he'd lose his main advantage, range, but on the other hand, if he didn't continue pursuit around the corner, the assassin could take the chance to escape.
Maro made his decision. He swung his weapon in a sharp, quick movement, taking advantage of the length of his blade to cut off the escape route. The moment he did, the assassin made an uncharacteristically reckless lunge at him, perhaps realizing Maro outmatched him. If he'd been expecting it, the response would have been simple: counterattack, with the knowledge that the longer zweihander would land its strike before the shortsword. But in the heat of the moment, Maro chose the safer course of action, deflecting the strike and maneuvering backward to gain distance.
That was all the opportunity the assassin needed to turn tail and flee.
Maro cursed and laid chase, sprinting down the parapet after his quarry, but as it turned out, there was no reason for him to be concerned, really. Because now a group of Oculatus agents had already reached the top of the stairwell that was the only way down from there. The assassin skidded to a stop as he realized he was well and truly cornered this time.
"Drop the weapon and surrender," Maro called out. "You're surrounded and outmatched."
Well, he didn't really expect that to work. The assassin did not, in fact, drop his weapon or surrender, and instead charged the agents blocking the stairwell. It ended… predictably. Four-on-one odds proved overwhelming, and it wasn't long before the assassin fell. One blade made it through his guard, landing across his sword arm in a way Maro knew would have severed enough muscle and tendon to be debilitating. After that, it was all but over. The assassin's parries came weak and uncoordinated, and it didn't take much longer for a lunge to land.
"Stupid," Maro chastised as he approached the Argonian, who was curled on the floor and holding both hands against the through-and-through stab wound he'd received through the abdomen in an unsuccessful effort to stem the flow of the blood pooling around the ground. "Got a death wish or something? We could have made a deal."
The Argonian let out a vicious hiss. "I am loyal to Astrid alone." An ironic statement, considering that very same Astrid would sell out their very own Listener to Maro in due time.
Speaking of which:
"Where's your Listener? Thought for a contact as public and dramatic as this one, you would've sent him to make a show of it."
The assassin laughed, then winced when that evidently worsened his pain. He looked up at Maro with his maw bared into a toothy grin that was all malevolence. "Seeking vengeance, hmm, Commander?"
Maro only glared.
The Argonian laughed again. "He had other matters to take care of. Sorry to disappoint. Hehe. We really struck a nerve there, didn't we?"
"Damn you. Damn all of you," Maro muttered, not particularly giving too much care to the lapse of professionalism in front of his subordinates.
The Argonian just laughed harder, despite the fact that it had to be causing an immense amount of agony, what with the stab wound and all.
Maro grit his teeth. And then he thrust the sword out through the assassin's throat, silencing him, permanently.
"Good work, men," he mumbled to the other agents mostly on autopilot as he turned to leave. "Take care of the body."
He'd done it. He'd prevented the assassination of Vittoria Vici. Far below the walls, the wedding guests were recovering from the shock of witnessing an attempted assassination, but the bride and the groom were, at least physically, unharmed.
So why was Maro feeling so… perturbed?
He couldn't have asked for a better outcome, except maybe getting a chance to kill the Listener—the assassin who murdered his son.
That's when he realized.
The assassin who showed up wasn't the same one who killed Gaius.
Maro wasn't there in person the first turn, but from the reports he received after the event, he was fairly certain the Listener had been the one to do the deed. But this time was different. This past was different—different from the one he remembered. And now, because Vici was alive, it would only continue to diverge. Because of his actions.
The implication suddenly made itself clear. Maro almost wanted to slap himself for not realizing sooner. He was changing his timeline, changing the past. Of course it wasn't just going to remain static—of course it was going to react to what he did in it. And the more he changed now, the less predictable the future would be.
He grit his teeth in irritation when he realized what that meant for him. Specifically, what that meant for what he had to do.
The source of his advantage was his memories of his previous life. While he still had that, he could use his knowledge to stay a step ahead of his enemies. But that was also his curse, because if he killed too many assassins, if he saved too many brides, the world could change beyond recognition. And then Maro would be back to square one—and he knew very well how that ended last time. That was how he would lose.
But that meant he needed to minimize the disturbances he created. Which meant he'd have to repeat all the same mistakes he made the first time around, and hope that having already saved Vici's life wasn't big enough of a ripple to invalidate his knowledge of the future past.
This future was not going to be enjoyable.
—
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
Alan Turing
Chapter Text
The Gourmet would be the next target. By now, the Brotherhood was probably already working on uncovering the famous but anonymous chef's identity.
And Maro needed to stand by and let it happen.
Because if he didn't, he could lose everything he's been working toward.
He hated that this was the case, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd already run through every possibility there possibly could have been of saving the Gourmet's life.
They couldn't have the chef disappear. The Brotherhood wouldn't take the chance of impersonating him if they didn't know his whereabouts, lest he show up to the Emperor's feast, which would completely ruin their plans. Of course, Maro knew that if he put such a plan into action, he'd ensure the Gourmet never stepped foot in the Emperor's tower until the feast was over, but he couldn't exactly just go and tell the Brotherhood that. That would be entirely ridiculous.
Similarly, faking the chef's death was out of the question. Maro knew how the Brotherhood operated. They were the kind to verify their kills. If their assassin found a dead Gourmet, it wouldn't stop them—they'd kill the man's corpse again, just to make extra certain their target was eliminated. Especially since an assassin would have to impersonate the chef later. No loose ends, and all that. Hells, in the first turn, they'd even killed that poor master chef in Markarth whose only mistake was owning an autographed copy of Uncommon Taste. If there's one thing to be said of the assassin cult, they certainly never did things by half measures.
At the end of the day, what it boiled down to was that the Brotherhood had to feel certain they could safely impersonate the Gourmet. Which meant the Gourmet had to die.
It was an unfortunate truth, but Maro had long since accepted that the end came before the means. It was part of the job description, for agents of the Penitus Oculatus, and this was far from the most unsavory thing he'd done in his life. And the Gourmet may be a brilliant chef, but a brilliant chef's life weighed against the life of the Emperor? The answer was obvious.
The show had to go on. He had to keep the timeline from diverging any further, lest his remembered information about the future become useless.
So as much as it pained him internally to do so, as much as the feeling that he was neglecting his duty threatened to overwhelm him, Maro did nothing with his knowledge of the Gourmet's impending assassination.
—
Maro tracked the progress of the Oculatus investigation for the next fortnight (trying to advance an investigation he already knew everything about without letting that prescience bleed into it, Maro learned, was an incredibly difficult endeavor—but no one had caught on yet, at least). In the passing time there had been other interesting developments—particularly, the assassination of a bard in Morthal caught Maro's attention one day. The kill itself, Maro remembered from the first turn. The manner of it was what stood out.
The murder was, for lack of a better word, messy. The bard had been found slashed to all hell in the tavern room he'd been renting. The guards speculated it was a crime of passion: someone finally grew sick enough of Lurbuk's singing to snap and kill him.
When Maro had first received the report, he initially felt a twisted sense of triumph. It was a little gratifying to know that the assassins had been so affected by their failed stunt at the wedding. But it was soon superseded by an ominous sense of perturbation.
Maro hoped this wasn't too strong a sign of things to come. So far it seemed like the fallout from the wedding incident was confined to just minor changes, but he was familiar with the idea of the 'Butterfly Effect'—even the smallest alterations would each induce their own effects that would spiral upon each other until nothing was recognizable anymore. It was too late to change what he'd done, though—all he could do, really, was hope. And make sure he didn't go too far off track in the future.
He considered what major events were supposed to happen next. Astrid, that was a big one. It was around this time that she sought him out to sell out the Listener and make her deal—a little later, actually: after the Gourmet had been killed. The timing made sense, too; by that time the Brotherhood would have been able to finalize their plans to impersonate the chef and infiltrate the dinner.
That was an event Maro didn't need to do much for. Astrid was the one who came to him, in the first turn, and technically he wasn't supposed to know the details of her identity at this point in time yet, only her name.
A couple of other assassinations had happened, too, on the small scale that suggested they were done as part of the usual minor contracts that were once the Skyrim Brotherhood's only work. Would it be suspicious if Maro managed to stop those? Probably.
Maro returned to the more mundane aspects of his position as outpost commander. General Tullius had sent word on the matter of Castle Dour's security—claimed to have a few clarifying questions, which Maro, of course, would have to answer.
He sighed. He hated waiting.
—
A few days later, when Maro left the outpost at the close of the day, he did so expecting a guest.
So when he was joined across the bridge by a familiar female figure—well, familiar to him, at least—he was very much not surprised by the development. She was dressed in nondescript travellers' clothes, but Maro wasn't fooled by the disguise. Astrid.
She started the conversation, just as she had the first time, when Maro actually hadn't recognized her. This time he did, but he didn't indicate it.
"Commander Maro?"
He stopped, turning slowly toward her. "You have me at a disadvantage," he lied. "Do I know you?"
"Perhaps," Astrid replied smoothly. "I have important information for you regarding the Dark Brotherhood. We should speak in a more… secure location."
Maro jerked his head in the direction of the outpost. "That so? My office, then."
The entirety of the short walk to the building, Maro kept Astrid in front of himself. It was a habit.
Finally, he let her into his office, following her in and moving to sit behind his desk, not taking his eyes off her for a moment.
He kept one hand on the knife he had stores in a drawer, as Astrid made herself comfortable. "Good instincts," she complimented, nodding toward his knife hand, "I suppose you already guessed at who I am, then?"
Maro narrowed his eyes, and didn't loosen the grip on the weapon. "I've surmised you're an assassin for the Dark Brotherhood. Pretty big risk you took, approaching me, when my goal is to destroy your organization. What do you want?"
"Oh, I'm not just an assassin, Commander," Astrid replied in that silky manner of hers, "I'm the Dark Brotherhood's matriarch." She held up her hands, a motion of 'surrender' that had no surrender in it, and instead just bled confidence. "Before you attack me, hear me out. I have an offer I think you'd be very interested in."
"And what's that?" Maro drummed the desk impatiently with his off hand. "What do you have to offer that would be better than the head of the Dark Brotherhood's leader?"
"Simple," she said, leaning back against the closed door, "the head of the assassin who killed your son." A smile oozed across her face. "I give you the Listener, and you let the rest of us go about our business. We won't cross paths again after that—promise."
Maro nodded slowly, releasing the dagger to steeple his hands in front of himself on the desk. Look intrigued. "I'm listening."
"I thought you might." Astrid offered a little bow and a flourish. "I'll send the Listener to the Emperor's Tower for that little feast you have planned. He'll be impersonating the chef—the Gourmet, was it? He'll try to escape via the bridge to the Solitude Windmill—all you'll need to do is set up an ambush there, and he's yours."
"And the Emperor?"
"Oh, we'll leave the real one alone. I know better than to ask as loyal a guard dog as you to let us assassinate his master."
Maro bristled a little at that, which sounded suspiciously like a veiled pejorative. No, he couldn't kill Astrid here, as much as her attitude irritated him. This was where he accepted the deal; killing her would have to wait until the Sanctuary raid.
Astrid just smirked at him. "It's just one contract, after all. The Dark Brotherhood's reputation will be plenty boosted just by infiltrating the Emperor's feast, even if we do only kill a decoy. After that, we'll just go back to what we were doing before: small-time contracts that you and your Imperial friends would have no reason to care about."
Divines, he hated her condescending mannerisms. If he hadn't been so desperate to get to the Listener the first turn, he probably would have cut her in two before she finished explaining her proposal. But, at that time, he was. And now, he had to take the deal once again, to make sure everything that came next would go according to plan.
"Fine," Maro replied gruffly, after taking a moment of feigned contemplation. "The Listener for your organization. You have a deal."
"A pleasure doing business with you," Astrid said. "I'm glad we could see eye to eye on this matter."
Maro just made a noncommittal noise. It was, in fact, not a pleasure. "Get out of here."
Astrid just offered a little curtsy before leaving—not turning her back to Maro for a moment. To be fair, he wouldn't turn his back to her either.
Once he was alone in the office, he allowed himself to drop the facade of the unmoved commander, slumping over his desk and holding his head in his hands.
The past few weeks had been exhausting, and Maro might've been close to the end, but this was far from over yet. Still, though, the preparations were complete; all that was left was the execution—the death of the Emperor's decoy at the feast, the ambush of the Listener, the destruction of the Sanctuary, the fight on the Solitude docks. All that was left was to go through the motions, to follow the script, and then, at the very end, he'd turn the tables on his fate.
Soon it would all be over.
Notes:
Not entirely satisfied with how short this ended up, so instead of doing something rational like write more, I'm just going to post two chapters in one week. Lead time what lead time?
Chapter Text
Two teams of agents stood at attention before him in the main workspace of the outpost. The date was 5th Frostfall, the morning of the day the Emperor's feast was scheduled, and Maro had summoned his agents prompt and early.
"Lieutenant Essagan, your team is with me. The Dark Brotherhood will be sending their Listener to the Emperor's Tower tonight. His Eminence has already employed a decoy. We'll intercept the assassin on the only escape route."
"Yes, sir."
"Captain Arcturus, you're responsible for raiding their Sanctuary in Falkreath. The door will ask for a passphrase—answer with 'silence, my brother.' Once you're in, put the place to the torch. Get in and out quickly—wait by the entrance for any that get smoked out."
"Yes, sir."
"Any questions?"
He looked around the room. It seemed like everyone understood their assignments.
Maro nodded. "Good luck. Do your Empire proud."
The sanctuary raid team departed immediately to make best speed toward Falkreath. Maro caught Arcturus on the way out, pulling him aside to the veranda at the side of the building.
"Commander?"
"Arcturus. Listen, I meant it when I said to keep it quick, in and out. Don't stay there any longer than necessary."
This was a terrible idea. Arcturus was supposed to die in the raid. Maro should not be messing around with the proper order of events, not until the very end.
But he couldn't stop himself.
"Your lives are more important than killing a few assassins."
Arcturus looked at him a little oddly, like he was trying to figure out what Maro was thinking. "Understood, sir. …are you sure you don't want to take leave?"
"I'm fine," Maro insisted. "Just concerned for the safety of my agents, that's all."
Arcturus's expression shifted into something skeptical. "We agreed last time we had this discussion that you're not."
"I never said that. And I thought we agreed last time to drop the matter."
"Sir…"
"Please, Arcturus—"
"…you're allowed to admit that you need time."
But Maro was on a timeline, with more or less hard deadlines. "The assassins won't wait. Neither can we."
"I don't want to see you burn yourself out, sir. You deserve time to—"
"Stop."
"—work through your grief. It's hardly been a month—"
"Don't you have a mission?"
"—you're only proving my point, sir."
"If that's how you want to see it, fine. I appreciate your concern. Really, I do. I'll take leave after the Emperor is safely back in Cyrodiil—until then, it will have to wait. This mission is too critical."
"...alright, sir. Just this one mission, yeah?"
"Yeah. Then I'll rest."
"…I'll get going, then, sir. And I'll make sure to come back."
"Thanks, Arcturus."
—
Maro only stayed at the outpost a moment longer to give his own squad a more thorough briefing of their mission. He went back to his home after that.
"Good afternoon, son."
He sat in the grass in front of his house, under the apple tree that had produced no fruit that year, hidden from the outside world and its observers by the walls surrounding the property.
"I hope that you've been keeping well, wherever you are."
A breeze flew past, and the nightshade stalks swayed gently with it around the Shrine of Arkay.
"Sorry I've been so busy. Just working a long mission."
The sun continued to shine. The river continued to run, the dull roaring of its falls filling the air. The world continued to move on.
"Seems like we're about to see the end of it, though. The Emperor will finally be safe. Just a few more days."
If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the gate to the lawn swinging open to his left as he sat in a lawn devoid of Shrines of Arkay or reseeded dirt mounds. He could almost hear soft steps on the cobblestone path and a cheerful greeting as Gaius returned home after another day, another shift. He could almost hear the soft slump of his son joining him at his side and asking what was so interesting about the wall. He wanted desperately to look left.
But he couldn't. Because he knew the gate would still be closed. Because he knew there would be no one else in the lawn. Because he knew that next to him was nothing more than empty space.
If he looked, that voice would fade.
So he didn't look. And he listened to Gaius regale him with tales of an agent's typical day shift. And he groaned sympathetically at the paperwork and chuckled at the rookie who broke their arm in an overeager training session and nodded along encouragingly at Gaius's lunch date with Faida. And in that moment, things
almost
felt okay.
The plaintive call of a mourning dove broke the fragile illusion, and Maro slowly opened his eyes again, finding his vision wavering and blurred by the droplets threatening to fall down his cheeks. The lone dove passed overhead, briefly casting a shadow of wings over the lonely gladius planted into the ground.
Maro sighed.
"I'll see you again soon, son."
As evening fell, Maro stood guard by the door to the Emperor's Tower, watching the last vestiges of sunlight disappear over the horizon.
The chef should be arriving just about now.
Right on schedule, a diminutive figure casually approached Maro's post. He stepped forward, intercepting the newcomer, holding out a hand in a command to halt.
"Stop right there. The tower is off limits until further notice."
The assassin was dressed the part, wearing a fine set of clothes and a floppy chef's hat. He'd also apparently had a makeover done, or perhaps just some illusion magic—the Brotherhood did have a mage among their number. The Argonian had drastically changed his apparent scale and eye color, and, given that back in Dragon Bridge no one had gotten a chance to get a good look at him under the cowl he'd been wearing, the average agent probably wouldn't have recognized him off facial structure alone.
Maro wasn't the average agent. He would have known immediately that this was his quarry, even if he didn't have Astrid's information or his own prior knowledge that the Gourmet had been taken out and replaced.
He tamped down the rage that threatened to rise. He very much would have liked to launch into an attack then and there, but—no. Follow the script.
The 'Gourmet' stopped as ordered, pulling out a slip of paper and holding it up for Maro to see—the Writ of Passage that had been issued to the chef.
"The Gourmet… the Gourmet! Your clothes—I'm sorry. I should have realized. Please, excuse my ignorance. Gianna, the castle chef, has been eagerly awaiting your arrival. You should proceed to the kitchens straight away."
He moved out of the way and indicated the entrance. "Just go right into the tower, and straight ahead to the kitchen. Gianna's expecting you."
As the Listener walked past him to the Tower doors, Maro turned away and allowed himself a small moment of triumph as the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a grin.
Maro would probably never get tired of seeing the various iterations of shock that flashed across the Listener's face when he was met at the bridge by an Oculatus ambush and one smug Commander. Could anyone blame him? It felt nice to be a step ahead for once, especially when his whole life he'd felt like he was always lagging behind.
"Surprised? So was I, when a member of your 'Family' came to me with the plan. We worked out a deal, you see. An exchange. I get you, and the Dark Brotherhood gets to continue its existence."
Even from up where he was standing, Maro could see the Listener gnashing his teeth together, with an offended expression on his face. Like he was the one who was wronged.
What an incredible level of entitlement. Did he expect Maro to just sit there and take it while he and his ilk killed his son and went after his Emperor? Maro returned the glare.
"But you know what? I've changed my mind. How about this? I kill you, and butcher each and every one of your miserable friends? Your Sanctuary's being put to the sword right now. That's what I think of this 'deal.' You killed my son! All of you! And now you'll pay the price."
He gave the order.
"Kill him. And make sure there's nothing left to bury."
Maro turned away to leave, as below him, he heard his agents engaging the Listener. The assassin would escape, of course. But that was also part of the plan.
—
Maro paced across the main work area of the Oculatus outpost, waiting with some impatience for the dust to settle.
The Solitude team arrived first. Logical, given the timing. Maro caught the eyes of the squad leader as she crossed the threshold into the outpost. "Report."
"Apologies, Commander. The assassin was able to escape. He managed to sprint through our lines, but he took some good hits in the process. By the time we got to Solitude's gates, he'd vanished."
Maro frowned. "How badly wounded was he?"
His subordinate shook her head. "Not enough to kill him."
"How unfortunate. But it was always a risk, and I arranged a contingency. I'm sure he'll try to rescue his compatriots at the Sanctuary, though—Arcturus's team'll be able to intercept him there."
"Yes, sir."
"You're dismissed, lieutenant."
And Maro was left back where he was before: waiting. This time, for the after-action report on the Sanctuary raid. Given the timeline, that team was probably still on the road. As for the report, it probably wouldn't arrive until the next day.
It didn't stop him from staying awake in the outpost for almost the whole night. This turn was going well, and if it was going to be the timeline he ended up living with, he wanted at least some outcomes to end in better results than the first turn.
He wanted his agents to survive, as many of them as possible.
Arcturus finally returned the next morning, as promised. Unfortunately his squad was short some men, but at least the casualty count was lower this time than it was the first turn.
Maro gave his second a tired smile. "Status?"
"The sanctuary was torched as planned. We didn't intercept anyone trying to escape the caverns. They must have all died in the blaze—there's no other way out of there. If the smoke and the flames didn't get them, well, the place was practically collapsing by the time we left. I doubt anyone made it through that."
"Good… good." Maro sighed heavily, a sound that was equal parts exhaustion and relief. "And good to have you back safely. And the casualty report?"
"Three. I'll have a full report ready for you by the end of the day." Arcturus canted Maro a look. "And in the meantime, you should sleep."
"Thanks," said Maro. "I suppose I will."
—
Days passed, and the time finally came for the Katariah to depart Skyrim. Maro headed out to Solitude, to stand guard on the docks, same as he did the first turn, all that time ago. But this time he wasn't going to let the Listener catch him unawares. This time he knew he was supposed to be surprise-attacked there, and this time he'd flip the script on his attacker, and this time,
He'd win.
He'd kill the Listener on the docks. The Emperor would finally be safe. Gaius would finally be avenged. And Maro could finally find rest.
The setup was done; the pieces were all in place.
It was time to end this at last.
Notes:
A/N: Trying to estimate travel times in Skyrim is so scuffed. If in-game time is to be trusted, the entire province comes out to be about the size of Connecticut, which is a little absurd. But then there's in-game events (Death Incarnate quest…) that suggest the place is even smaller than that and one could make Solitude to Falkreath in a matter of hours(?) at a brisk sprint. On the other hand, Skyrim's biome variability suggests a much larger landmass. But then again, people in-game just kind of walk around on the roads between the cities, implying that walking is a viable way of getting places for normal people, implying a small landmass.
I'm just going to use a rule of thumb of roughly doubling in-game time, mostly because I prewrote four more chapters after this one based on in-game time before realizing how much of a problem it actually posed but Skyrim really shouldn't be that small, so this is the scuffed compromise I'm going with.
Time for a little handwaving:
"Your Sanctuary's being put to the sword right now" = "I sent a bunch of agents to attack the Sanctuary and they'll be there in a day and a half but they have a head start on you so good luck lmao"
That's gonna come back to haunt me later, isn't it?
Chapter 6: Flat Circle
Chapter Text
Maro couldn't shake the feeling that he'd missed something.
He was on the docks of Solitude, patrolling up and down the creaking wood platforms, keeping watch over the massive flagship resting tranquilly in the distance, and on the people milling back and forth on the docks.
This was where it all came to an end, that first time. After everything, he'd made it here again, where that accursed Argonian had killed him before, vengeance for vengeance. But this time, Maro wasn't going to be caught off guard. He knew what to look for, what to expect. Everything had played out as expected—the poisoned feast, the ambush on the bridge, the assassins' Listener escaping Solitude in a frantic chase. Any moment now, Maro would run into the assassin on these docks.
And yet he still couldn't shake that foreboding feeling.
Maro was a warrior. It had been a great many years since he last was a soldier in the traditional sense, but that didn't mean he let his instincts fade. Maybe he wasn't as sharp now as he was when he was in his twenties, but he still had that battle sense. And he knew better than to dismiss it. No, something was wrong here, and even if he didn't know how he knew, he still, at some level, knew.
It was for his own peace of mind that he took a canoe up to the Katariah. He just had to be sure.
Nothing seemed amiss on the main deck as he boarded the ship. The other agents assigned to the ship's security milled around, pausing in their patrol routes to salute him as he passed. Normally he'd return the gesture, but that lingering sense of unease hung behind him like a haunting ghost, spurring his feet onward without delay. The pace he took on was distinctly brisk.
What exactly made him so uneasy, he'd never know. Perhaps it was a blessing, but he was more inclined to think it was a curse. Because he opened that door and the wave of regret that hit him completely overpowered the smell of blood. Regret that he wasn't guarding the room, regret that he didn't check on the Emperor sooner, regret that he was the first one to open the door, regret that he even accepted this mission at all.
Maro stopped short, chest heaving, as soon as he entered the room—
Because the Emperor was dead.
Blood splattered the windows and pooled on the deckboards under the corpse that was once the most powerful man in Cyrodiil. Maro stepped forward slowly—and there, as he expected, was a trail of bloodied claw-prints padding away to a door in the port-side hull. He flung the door open, and was immediately hit by salty wind and the spray of the sea. A balcony.
Of course.
The track of prints went right to the edge. There was one more planted on the balcony railing, like a capstone to the story left in the wake of the murder. In his mind's eye, Maro could see it: the Argonian assassin who haunted him for so long, slicing the Emperor apart and calmly making his escape, diving from the balcony into the refuge of the ocean, entirely undetected. How much of a head start did the assassin have—minutes? Hours? Maro was well aware of how swift an Argonian could be in water. The killer was probably long gone already.
Maro gripped the balcony railing, trying to keep his world from crashing down around him. He was this close to losing it. He'd gotten all the way here, even further than he did before the first time he died, and yet still he had nothing to show for it, nothing but just another story of his failure, written in wet crimson across the walls of the room behind him. Some damn agent he was. Couldn't protect his Emperor even when he had full knowledge of what was coming. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought Akatosh was playing some kind of cruel cosmic joke on him.
"Commander Valerus Maro?"
Maro turned. He didn't recognize the agent who had called his name, which meant the agent hadn't been stationed at Dragon Bridge with him. Which meant he was probably a member of the Katariah's security detail—no, most likely the head of the detail, judging from the authoritative air he held about himself. Deep breath. Maro had to keep it together for now, at least until he got off this ship. Once he was back in the safety of his home, then he could let out his impending emotional crisis.
"Yes, that would be me," he replied. "I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage."
"Commander Tirius," the other agent introduced himself curtly, then cut right to the chase. "Your reports indicated your agents successfully eliminated any Dark Brotherhood presence in Skyrim."
Maro grit his teeth. "Evidently, I missed one."
"Evidently," the other commander agreed neutrally. "You're to return with us to Cyrodiil. There will, of course, be an inquiry," is what he said, but what he meant was the blame for this will fall on you.
So much for returning to Dragon Bridge to have a mental breakdown in peace.
"Very well," said Maro stiffly, though he was cursing internally. Just like him to manage to ensure things somehow ended up going even further downhill this turn. The first time, the Brotherhood just settled for just plain killing him; this time, though, the assassins had taken his honor, and the ones to kill him would be doing so at the directive of the very Empire he served.
Tirius jerked his head toward the door, where an escort was already waiting. Maro didn't bother arguing. He shuffled along with them with a stone-faced, impassive demeanor that almost reflected the empty hole that was swallowing his emotions. He allowed himself to be confined to a relatively mundane quarters. There, he sat down, and there, he waited. He couldn't care to do anything more than that.
The ride to Cyrodiil passed in a daze. Maro hardly retained any memory of it. But there he was now, stepping off the boat into the Waterfront District of the city that was once his home. But this wasn't a homecoming. Maro was fairly certain he was a prisoner here. He was going to be court-martialed. Dereliction of duty, probably. It's what he would have done, if it was one of his subordinates in his position. And for a dereliction that resulted in the death of the Emperor, the ruler Maro had sworn his life to, he was also fairly certain what price would be required of him.
—
The prison wing was surprisingly warm.
He always thought it would be colder.
—
One thing Maro had always admired about the Imperial Legion was their efficiency. The Cyrodilic government was leaderless, the Elder Council had fractured and factionalized after an ambitious Breton noble tried to take advantage of the Emperor's death and perform a power grab, but the Imperial Legion had still put together a court martial within the week.
The trial did not take very long either. The case, after all, was open-and-shut. Titus Mede II was dead, murdered before he could depart Solitude on his own flagship that should have been under the watch of the Skyrim Penitus Oculatus division. Valerus Maro's division. So as their commanding officer, he was to be held responsible for the failure. He was charged with dereliction of duty, as expected, and the verdict was already a forgone conclusion.
Most of the elapsed time was taken up by the publicizing of the case. The trial had no closed doors, no private proceedings. There was a whole song and dance to go through, and the Imperial Tribunal was full well making a show of it.
Maro was being made a spectacle.
He followed the proceedings absently. For most of the duration of the trial he did nothing but sit unmoving in the courtroom as his competency was doubted and his name dragged through disgrace. Nothing that was said about him would be anywhere near as reproachful or cruel as what he already thought of himself, anyway. After all, none of the tribunal could know the true extent of just how badly Maro had gone and fucked everything up. It must take a particularly unique brand of incompetence to fail a mission, get a chance to redo it with all the memories of the previous run intact, and still fail the mission a second time, but that's exactly what Maro had done.
At some point he was questioned. The tribunal had clearly prepared their questions to try to trap him into incriminating himself. Honestly, they didn't have to go to so much effort over it. It's not like anything Maro said would salvage the situation at all.
"Did you report that the Skyrim Dark Brotherhood had been eradicated?"
"I did."
"Did that turn out to be the case?"
"No."
"What happened on the 7th of Frostfall, 4E201?"
"The Emperor was scheduled to set sail for the Imperial City from Solitude. A member of the Dark Brotherhood infiltrated his flagship while it was anchored at port and assassinated him."
"What happened on the 26th of Last Seed, 4E201?"
That took him by surprise. He couldn't help but narrow his eyes at the questioner. "What is the relevance of that?"
Another voice came from a different member of the tribunal, cold and impassive. "Answer the question, Commander."
Maro resisted the urge to clench a fist. "A Dark Brotherhood assassin murdered agent Gaius Maro as he embarked on a mission to review the hold capitals' security."
"What was your relation to Gaius Maro?"
"...he was my son." He had to fight to keep his tone neutral.
"Would you say his death compromised your fitness for duty, Commander?"
So that was why they asked. Maro sighed, and answered honestly, despite knowing it would do nothing but seal his fate. Although, he was fairly certain the situation was already far beyond salvaging. "I would."
"Did you relieve yourself of duty after your son's death compromised your ability to command?"
"No."
"On the 5th of Frostfall, 4E201, your agents raided the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary in Falkreath; is that correct?" "That's correct."
"Did you verify that every known Dark Brotherhood assassin was killed in the raid?" "No."
"Why not?"
So the timeline would remain intact, but I can't tell you that. "The fire made it impossible."
"Did you order the fire to be set?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I thought torching the place would, I don't know, be more cathartic." At least, that was the reason for the order the first time Maro gave it.
His interrogator nodded. The point had been made. "Nothing further."
The verdict came as no surprise.
"The defendant is found guilty on the charge of dereliction of duty and negligence resulting in the death of the Emperor. The sentence is death."
—
Maro wasn't expecting visitors, especially with how strict the guards were being about security in the wing he was being held in. But he did get one, the night before his execution.
"Arcturus. You shouldn't be here."
"Commander—"
Maro cut off his former subordinate gently. "I no longer hold that rank."
"Commander," Arcturus repeated, and it was clear to Maro that he wasn't winning that particular battle, "with all due respect, if someone orders me not to show you the respect you've earned, I'll let them know where they can stuff that order."
Maro raised a brow. "And if I so order you?"
"If you so order me, then I believe I am no longer required to follow those orders." Arcturus cracked a grin. He didn't succeed in keeping the bitterness out of it.
Maro sighed. "Arcturus, please. My disgrace should not be your burden. I agreed to accept full responsibility for the Emperor's death. Don't let this become a stain on your career—your service thus far has been admirable."
"The tribunal wasn't fair to you," Arcturus protested. "None of us could have seen it coming. Every surviving agent on the Sanctuary raid thought we got them all."
Oh, if only you knew.
"I just… I don't understand, Commander. You didn't just 'accept responsibility' back there. You gave them everything they were looking for—everything they needed to order your execution. Why would you just—consign yourself to that fate?" Arcturus let out a heavy sigh, rubbing a hand over his face. "You deserve better than this."
"I'm glad you still think so highly of me. But really, I don't. For the depth of my failure, no punishment is sufficient."
"Commander," Arcturus pressed. "Those assassins took your son from you. You've lost more than anyone should ever have to. That you still had the grit within yourself to keep fighting—that alone made you the strongest man I know."
Maro… had nothing to say to that. That was a matter of opinion, and Arcturus was entitled to his. But… "I appreciate that. I do, really. And thank you for speaking in my defence at the trial. But the outcome has been decided."
"You can't ask me to let them execute you for something that clearly wasn't your fault!"
"I can and I will. You're an excellent officer. Please don't throw your career away for a failed commander with nothing to live for." Maro stepped closer to the bars of the cell door. "Arcturus. This is the final thing I will ask of you. Don't attend the execution tomorrow. Let it go. Let me go."
"...fine. Fine." Arcturus was clearly still unhappy about the situation, but acquiesced nonetheless. He pulled himself into a salute. "I don't care what anyone else says or thinks. Serving under you has been the greatest honour of my career." Then he dropped his hand and his whole posture drooped. "It shouldn't have ended like this. I'm… going to miss you."
Maro just smiled. It was meant to be reassuring, but he could tell Arcturus wasn't buying it. Nonetheless, he told his former subordinate, "I'll be alright." None of my previous deaths managed to stick, after all. He doubted this one would, either, regardless of how much he wanted it to.
"I see." The sorrow was evident in Arcturus's tone. "Then… I hope you find the peace you're looking for."
Probably not. But Arcturus didn't need to know that.
"Goodbye, Commander. Maybe we'll see each other again, in Aetherius, or wherever. You better wait for me."
"I'm sure we will."
Oh, you have no idea.
—
Maro didn't sleep that night.
There was a faint draft in the prison wing. Every so often, he thought he heard a familiar voice on the wind.
I miss you too. Amilia. Gaius.
I think… it will be a little longer before I can come back home.
I don't know when, exactly. Whenever I figure out what it takes for Akatosh to finally let me die.
Yes,
I'll go to see you as soon as I'm able.
—
The first time Maro had witnessed a hanging was in his youth, back when he was still a greenhorn in the Imperial Legion. The condemned was a traitor, a spy for the Thalmor during that tense few years before the official start of the Great War. He'd wondered back then whether the prisoner suffered.
Now he was the one standing on a creaking wooden scaffold with a black hood over his head and a loop of rope around his neck, and, well.
He'd finally learn the answer.
—
"This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me that time is a flat circle. Everything we have ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again—forever."
Rustin Cohle, True Detective
Thrēnus Ad Sōla Arbor
Act 1: Threnody
Fīnis.
Chapter 7: From the Top Again
Chapter Text
Thrēnus Ad Sōla Arbor
Act 2:
The Apple
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Albert Einstein
—
The suffocating grip of the rope faded as it was replaced by the far more familiar choking sensation of the river in his throat. Maro swam up, broke the surface, coughed out water, found himself in the Karth on the worst day of his life.
Again.
Maybe he really had meddled too much. Changed too many things. And all it got him was another attempt at his thrice-failed mission.
Why couldn't he do anything right?
It was too much. The repeating. Failing over and over. Experiencing Gaius' death over and over.
Maro wanted to scream. Or rant, or, something. Because leaping off a bridge and diving into a river didn't make him look like enough of a nutcase already. He hadn't just reached his breaking point—he was long past it. He'd passed it a long time ago.
The loops weren't ending, but Maro had long since stopped trying to guess at what Akatosh—if this truly was the doing of Akatosh—wanted of him.
Perhaps this was a penance. For his failure to protect the Emperor, Maro would be doomed to relive his failures, over and over again, all the million different iterations they could've played out, all the things he once thought he could have done differently, all the ways all his efforts would still lead to the same ending.
He let out the scream of frustration that had been brewing as he drew his dagger and stabbed it into the boulder he washed up on. The blade snapped with a sonorous little ting. He stared blankly at the broken weapon for a moment, at the clean straight fracture across it.
A cold, clear rage rose slowly in him like a tide, and all of a sudden he didn't care about Akatosh, or the emperor, or the purpose of the loop. It wasn't enough to just try again and hope the rest of the world cooperated. This time he'd force the change he wanted to see.
All of this stemmed from the Dark Brotherhood. They took everything from him.
And if this was the afterlife that Maro was fated to spend the rest of eternity in, then at the very least, he was going to destroy them, fully, for once in his life. Even if the world just reset again. Even if it wouldn't make a difference in the end. Just to prove that he could.
To Oblivion with it all. Forget the timeline. He just needed to gut the bastards.
"We're raiding the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary," Maro announced, as he strode into the outpost. He could see the surprise that the statement elicited—not at the mission objective itself, but at the abruptness of its announcement. Throughout his long record of service Maro had always preferred to scheme, to plan out every intricate detail of an operation, anticipate possible divergences, design the necessary contingencies. Every detail considered, every variable controlled for.
He felt a rise of rumbling frustration at the thought of it. The agonizing waiting that just seemed to drag on and on between missions, while every part of him yearned to hunt the assassins down and kill them himself—Maro wasn't sure he could put up with it a third time.
Besides, there were two ways to win a game of chess. One was to play the game slowly, with careful premeditation and purpose behind every move. A method that entailed calculating a dozen moves ahead, gaining small and incremental advantages with every one until the opponent found themself trapped in the crosshairs of a deadly attack with no way out. This was the elaborate campaign Maro crafted against the Dark Brotherhood, the plan he deployed that first time to destroy them. But all it brought Maro was ruin, in the end. He had believed he was calculating every move the Brotherhood could make and all the best ways to respond, but in reality he just ended up a step behind, outplayed.
But then there was the second way. An aggressive blitz attack right out of the opening, applying pressure from the first move and looking for checkmate before the opponent could even finish development. It was pretty clear by now that Maro would need to employ a change of tactic if he was to succeed, and he may as well start with this one. It wasn't as though there were any consequences to failure that Maro hadn't already experienced.
"I know this is unorthodox," he conceded. "But the Dark Brotherhood is already executing a fully formed plan. We can't afford to fall behind. We need to end this, now."
There was a moment of silence, but only a moment. Then, a flurry of salutes returned, as the agents fell in. "Yes, sir!"
—
From the moment he stepped into the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary it was like he was on autopilot. It had been a very long time since Maro had been in the field, in this kind of messy, chaotic many-on-many fight, but he never for a second forgot how to fight it. The Penitus Oculatus and the Imperial Legion had been merged into, for all intents and purposes, a single entity during the Great War, when every sword arm possible was needed against the Dominion. Maro had seen plenty of action then, for better or for worse. It was then, desperately defending the Imperial City from the Dominion hordes to buy time for the Emperor to escape, that he'd learned for the first time how it felt to have someone in his family ripped from him. But it had also left him with the hard-earned lessons of experience when it came to fighting multiple opponents in close quarters. And just like back then, he was going to avenge his loss, by drowning his failure in the blood of his enemies.
And that's exactly what he was doing now, a hot spray of crimson hitting his arms as he guided his montante in a wide, lethal arc that took a black-hooded head with it. He was, at the moment, fending off four—now three—assailants from various directions, who had attacked him the moment he entered the sanctuary's main cavern. Between parries he'd managed to order the rest of his team to go on and clear the rest of the cavern while he kept these entrance defenders occupied.
Although, granted, it was pretty clear that none of those three were experienced in melee combat, nor had any of them suitable weapons. They were all three trying to come at him with daggers. It was a rather ridiculous notion.
One of the things that had stuck with Maro throughout the years was a demonstration he'd seen once a long time ago, back when he himself was still a green recruit. The Legion had invited the Penitus Oculatus to a friendly sparring tournament, and his instructor put on an impressive demonstration during the exhibition matches, where he with his montante stood alone and bested in a spar three gladius-wielding Legionnaires.
Compared to them, these three assassins with their diminutive knives stood no chance. Maro held the advantage in weapon choice and possessed significantly greater skill. The conclusion was all but already decided.
He maneuvered until he backed the one in the jester's attire up against a wall, then lunged and punched right through what paltry guard was offered by a blade as light and short as the dagger, cleaving the jester's chest open without ever even entering the assassin's reach.
And then there were two.
He wasted no time pivoting to his remaining opponents. It also soon became apparent that the jester had been the most adept—the most dangerous—between the three. In the new gaps where the jester previously would have darted in before to deflect an attack or force Maro's attention off of focusing one of his colleagues, Maro was now able to apply constant pressure, keeping the two assassins on the defensive. A well-timed lunge had the tip of his blade penetrating the guard of the Dark Elf—she went down in an instant, and now it really was over. Eliminating the third assailant was a simple matter: a heavy swing to with sheer momentum wrench the assassin's knife out of his grip, and then a decisive thrust to end the fight. His last opponent slid unceremoniously off his blade, leaving behind a heavy slick of blood, as Maro straightened out of his combat stance.
And in the end he stood in the main cavern victorious, chest heaving, montante dripping rivulets of red, surrounded by fallen corpses shrouded in the dark garb of the Brotherhood. The other agents accompanying him on the raid dragged their own kills into the area from the halls they'd been in charge of sweeping. Maro pretended not to notice the way at least a few of them looked at him like it was the first time they were really seeing him.
One mark of a good leader was their ability to understand their subordinates. It had been a long time since Maro last was bold enough to consider himself a good leader, but understand his agents, he could. He could sense the definite, if well-controlled, uncertainty in the atmosphere.
Arcturus finally broke the silence, asking, in a tone like this was business as usual, "well, sir? You know the Dark Brotherhood better than any of us. Is this all of them?"
Maro took count.
Eleven assassins, eleven kills.
He let out a long sigh, equal parts exhaustion, relief, catharsis. At last, the fight was over. Maro just wanted to rest.
"Yes. As far as my information goes, every assassin has been accounted for here," he answered, and even he couldn't keep the relief from noticeably entering his tone. "We've done it."
He's done it. He destroyed the Dark Brotherhood at last. His only regret was that he hadn't been the one who had the privilege of personally cutting down the assassin who killed his son.
Around him, his agents cheered, passing around congratulations among themselves and to Maro, but he suddenly found it inexplicably difficult to focus on… anything happening around him. It was as if the world was taking on a strange cast of fuzziness, like he suddenly needed glasses. The accolades from his comrades-in-arms sounded muffled to his ears. Everything looked strangely flat, washed out and smudged, like shape and detail were being lost. No—erased. Maro rubbed his eyes, and blinked, and staggered to the side, suddenly hit with a wave of dizziness—
—
And he was plunged into water.
When he broke the surface and squeezed the water from his eyes, the sight that greeted him was one that was long familiar by now. The stone banks of the Karth River flanked him on both sides. The carved dragon on the bridge seemed to stare down at him almost mockingly.
The loop had reset.
Why?
He'd killed them all. Every Dark Brotherhood assassin was dead. He'd personally verified the headcount. The Emperor was safe from their plot because there was no one left to carry it out. And Maro himself hadn't died or even been mortally wounded. The parameters to reset the loop shouldn't have been met.
And yet there Maro was, sitting miserably on the shore of the Karth on the worst day of his life, again.
Why? If not stopping the assassination of the Emperor, what did Divine want from him? Why wouldn't the time-god just let him die?
Damn Akatosh. Damn how he refused to just explain what the point of this all was. Damn how he was apparently content to let Maro continue to flail blindly in the dark, constantly tortured by his failure, waiting for some miracle where he somehow stumbled across whatever condition it was that would end the loop.
Well. It was probably a little too optimistic to think it was ever going to be that simple, with how much the world seemed to hate him. All he wanted in the first place was the catharsis of finally succeeding at something, though, and at least he'd gotten that.
And, well, maybe he'd do it again. And again. And again. If this was his personal hell, then he'd make his own little stand of stubborn defiance against the afterlife itself.
After all, he had all of eternity.
Chapter 8: Meeting Sides
Chapter Text
He was back with another assault group again. Going through that cavern, destroying the Sanctuary, it was cathartic, to be entirely honest. It came with a feeling of satisfaction that Maro hadn't felt anything similar to for a very long time. He was going to enjoy it for a few more loops. After everything he'd been through, he needed it.
He headed to the barracks, taking down that Dark Elf who still didn't have the level of experience he had in melee combat. Didn't matter to him; he didn't let up for a second as he took her head before continuing to advance.
A conversation in hushed, angry tones caught Maro's attention, and he froze, listening closer. He still couldn't make out any distinct words, but he could tell it was coming from the room around the corner he was coming up on. And something about the speaker's voice set him off—the rasping, sibilant syllables unmistakably belonged to an Argonian.
He rounded the corner, sword raised, in one decisive motion—
Black scales, malicious violet eyes, rippling muscles in a compact and lithe frame—even after all this time Maro could still recognize in a heartbeat the man who killed his son.
And Maro saw red.
He let out an inarticulate roar as he charged, slamming into the Argonian with all the force he could muster. It took the assassin by surprise, just how sudden and, really, reckless the attack was, but it worked and that's all that mattered. The two men crashed to the ground, Maro on top.
He screamed again, as a dozen lifetimes of pain and anguish and failure, barely contained, bursting at the seams for so long, finally boiled over. He hardly felt the pain shooting through his own hands as he slammed a fist into the Argonian's face. The assassin opened his mouth and might have tried to speak, but Maro didn't hear it. He couldn't even hear his own screams over the blood roaring in his ears. And he was beyond the point of caring. His son's murderer didn't deserve to speak.
He slammed his fist down again, and the sharp crack of the assassin's jaw snapping in two sounded sharply through the air, loud enough that he heard it even through his rage. Not that it was enough. Just a shattered mandible was nothing compared to Maro's pain. No. It would never be enough. He punched the Argonian again,
again,
again,
again—
Through his rage, Maro's instincts were still intact, though, and that's what alerted him to the faint but distinct sound of his montante scraping against the ground as someone picked it up. Someone else in the room, someone who wasn't him.
Right. He'd dropped it when he threw himself at the Argonian—who, Maro now realized, was beyond dead at that point, what with the now shapeless skull and the exposed bits of wrinkly grey. He shot up to his feet, whirling around toward the source of the sound. The best case scenario was that one of his agents had walked in on the scene, but it seemed luck wasn't going to be on his side this time. Then again, this one was entirely Maro's fault. Because in his enraged assault, he'd completely forgotten that the Argonian hadn't just been talking to himself—there had been another assassin in the room.
And that other assassin now had his sword. His sword, the one that had been in his family for generations, that was more a symbol of the Maro name than any crest could be. The sword that should have passed down to Gaius.
Maro grit his teeth at the sight. "Get your hands off that," he snapped, unstable danger leaking into every syllable.
His new adversary was holding the pilfered weapon in front of himself defensively, his back to the far wall, eyes flicking warily between the commander and the dead Argonian's corpse. To Maro's surprise, though, there was no attack forthcoming. Or any sort of aggression, for that matter.
Upon closer inspection, the assassin didn't seem to harbor any intent to attack Maro. The way he held the sword was unmistakably defensive. And not even the deadly sort of defensiveness used by warriors who specialized in combat styles that gain advantage by ceding initiative. No, while the assassin's display might have been a good enough imitation to convince a lesser man, Maro was a seasoned enough warrior to see the inexperience that clung around the edges of the way the assassin wielded the sword.
It almost reminded him of—
"Show me," Valerus prompted gently, and offered his son the montante.
Gaius was nearing fifteen at the time, following in Valerus's footsteps as an agent in the Penitus Oculatus, and was just about ready to commence training with 'real' weapons. He accepted the sword, hefting it experimentally, shifting its balance around in his hands until they grew accustomed. And then, he raised it, settling into a combat stance.
"Not bad," Valerus finally decided, after an appraising once-over. Gaius's form was a little rough around the edges, tinged with inexperience, but otherwise, it was clear he'd studied the theory behind good swordsmanship. "Not bad. Now hold that there. Let me correct your stance."
—No.
Gaius had been an honorable member of the Penitus Oculatus. Valerus was not going to tarnish his son's memory by comparing him to this… this glorified murderer. He blinked away the tears that had welled in his eyes, and forced his mind to the present once more. Don't think about it.
He was still an agent of the Penitus Oculatus, and was therefore perfectly capable of fighting unarmed, especially against someone who clearly had no real combat experience with the weapon they held. Maro darted forward, closing the distance in one smooth motion and going for his sword. The assassin didn't really offer much of a fight at all—as soon as Maro made his move, he just seemed to give up entirely on any notion of defending himself. Instead, he just allowed the commander to wrench the sword from his tenuous grip, flinching back and throwing his hands up in surrender, like it would do him any good. Maro wasn't here to take prisoners.
The Brotherhood hadn't shown his son any mercy, so he would show none to them.
He was easily able to slam his opponent's thin frame against the wall, bringing the edge of his damn sword to the assassin's neck. "Nice try," he growled, pressing the blade in ever so slightly and drawing a thin line of crimson as he loomed over the assassin. "Any last words?"
The assassin's breath caught in his throat, but although wide eyes stared up at the commander, no words were forthcoming. Maro expected some kind of defiance, or a string of threats and oaths, the usual kinds of reactions he got when he had one of their ilk at his mercy. But instead, the assassin just shut his eyes with a wince and waited under the blade.
He looked awfully young.
Once again, memories of Gaius threatened to resurface unbidden, and once again, Maro forced them back down. That subject was still a pit of despair, and if he wasn't careful he'd lose himself in it, which was not ideal when he was in the midst of a hostile environment. He had a job to do, a duty to fulfill, a wretched mockery of a 'family' to destroy. He drew his arm back, muscles primed. A single stroke, and he'd send his blade clean through the assassin's neck. He took a breath…
…and found himself lowering his sword.
The assassin's eyes flew open when the sharp pressure disappeared. The look of surprise on his face mirrored Maro's own feelings. Why did he stop? Maro himself wasn't sure. And yet, he found himself backing off the assassin with a heavy sigh. "How old are you?"
For a split second the assassin's expression turned dubious, but then, with shaking hands, he hesitantly raised one finger, then four. It confirmed Maro's suspicions. The kid wasn't even of age. What was he doing in a den of murderous cultists?
Maro took a breath. Then he grabbed a chair, sliding it across the floor to face himself. "Come here and take a seat."
The assassin shuddered, and glanced at the bloody mess Maro had made of the Argonian.
"That's an order," Maro added, voice hard. There were limits to his mercy, and he wasn't going to tolerate defiance from the assassin, age notwithstanding. "Don't think because you're still breathing that you're off the hook. I still have half a mind to cut you down where you stand, for what your cult did to me. Now sit down and answer my questions."
Reluctantly, the assassin slunk closer, and slowly slid into the chair. Maro brought his sword to his prisoner's chest, catching the tip pointedly on a fold of black cloth. "I don't think I need to remind you not to try anything."
The assassin visibly froze, then responded with a tiny nod.
"Good." Maro brought the blade back to a rest position at his side, setting the tip lightly on the ground. "Your name?"
"Vithsil, sir," answered the assassin, meekly, in hardly more than a whisper.
"Got a surname, 'Vithsil'?"
He shook his head.
"Not very vocal, are you?"
The assassin glanced at Maro nervously like he was trying to decide if that question had a right and wrong answer. Perhaps he was. Finally, he shook his head again.
"Hm. Fine. But I expect my questions to be answered in full. Understood?"
The answer was immediate. The assassin nodded quickly, then added, "yes, sir."
Maro gestured sharply at the spot on the wall where he'd previously had the assassin pinned. "So what was that? I would've thought someone who kills for a living would be better at fighting."
The assassin murmured something quietly in response, which Maro only caught the trailing end of, "…don't want to fight you, sir."
"Really." Maro let his skepticism bleed from the word. "You expect me to believe that? You tried to steal my sword."
Vithsil ducked his head, looking away. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just didn't want to die the way—" he swallowed hard, and looked over at the Argonian again, before repeating, even softer somehow, "I'm sorry."
Maro finally let out a heavy sigh. "Agh—whatever. Stay put." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the assassin just nodded and sat compliantly as Maro circled around behind him, took hold of his black hood, and pulled it down.
After decades in the Imperial Legion, Maro could pretty confidently say he's seen a lot of things. But he'd never seen anything like what he was looking at now. The kid superficially resembled a Nord, but the removal of the concealing hood revealed what looked like faint scales running across his forehead and down his cheekbones, slightly pointed ears, and two little horns peeking out from under messy brown hair.
Maro masked any semblance of surprise with the stoicism of a trained Penitus Oculatus agent. "Hm. What race are you?" he asked coolly, as he began to wrap a linen over the cut on the kid's throat.
He could hear Vithsil's breathing pick up as the assassin's hands made an abortive movement up toward his throat, stopping halfway. Maro frowned, taking a moment to analyze the reaction. "I'm not trying to garrotte you. Sit still."
"Sorry, sir. I—I don't know what I am."
"Fine." Maro paused a moment to flick a hand at the corpse. "That Argonian there. Friend of yours?"
After a moment, he was answered by a shake of the head.
"Hm. Lucky you." Maro finished dressing the wound, and circled back around to face his prisoner. He barely caught the assassin's soft, almost inaudible murmur.
"Thank you, sir."
He only hmed in acknowledgement, before falling back into his role as a Penitus Ocularist commander; cold, efficient, professional. "We're still taking you in. Get up and give me your wrists."
The assassin took a moment of time to put his hood back up. Maro decided to allow it. A moment later, the kid was on his feet, meekly holding his hands out in front of himself.
"Carrying any other weapons?"
The assassin shook his head. Maro wasn't too inclined to trust it, but then again, the assassin had felt the need to commandeer his montante. On the other hand, his paranoia's what got him this far in life. Well, in any case, he could do a more thorough search later.
"Good. I'm taking you into custody. As of this moment, you are my prisoner," Maro recited as he bound his prisoner's wrists. He leaned in closer, his tone modulating from neutrally official to a quieter threatening. "Try anything and I'll cleave you in two. Understand?"
The assassin's breath caught again for a moment before he answered, "yes, sir."
—
"Commander! Are you all right?" Arcturus noticed almost immediately when Maro returned to the main cavern. And, evidently, also noticed the fact that Maro's hands and arms were absolutely coated in blood, from, well, beating a man's skull in against the hard stone ground. Actually, quite a few agents were staring at Maro looking like they'd seen a ghost.
"I'm uninjured," he reassured his subordinate, "just got into a messy fight."
"I see. Prisoner, sir?" Arcturus was peering at the captive assassin with no small level of curiosity. He sounded surprised. "I didn't expect you to take any."
"Nor I," Maro answered. "He seems docile enough, though, and he's worth more to me alive than dead right now."
Arcturus just shrugged. "Suppose it doesn't make a difference in the end. It's either your blade or the headsman's axe."
"True enough," said Maro, and he ignored the way the assassin stilled under his hold. "What's the status of the rest of the Sanctuary?"
"Cleared out, sir. We hunted down and killed every assassin here—well, almost every assassin, anyway." Arcturus eyed the prisoner.
Maro frowned. "How many?"
There was a short moment of discussion and cross-checking among the agents. A moment later, Arcturus responded, "Five between the lot of us, sir."
"Plus the two I killed and this one here," Maro tapped his prisoner's shoulder, "makes eight. We've got escapees. You, prisoner." Maro pulled his captive to the row of bodies his agents had collected. "You recognize them all?"
Vithsil nodded.
"Who's missing?"
Maro watched as his prisoner's eyes flicked across the bodies. He wondered absently if the kid was aware he was shrinking back into Maro's grip. After a moment, he received the answer he had asked for.
"Um… Gabriella, Nazir, Babette, Faleril. Blade, too, but… you killed him."
"Is Blade the Argonian?"
Vithsil nodded, a little hesitantly.
"The other one I killed was a Dark Elf. Who's that?"
"G-Gabriella."
"So that leaves three—Nazir, Babette, Faleril. Fine. We'll talk more in Dragon Bridge."
"Yes, sir."
Maro gestured to the other agents to form up. "Alright, I think we've done all we can here. Let's head back."
—
It was on the border of Rorikstead that their journey was prematurely interrupted. A distant roar over the horizon was the only warning anyone received before, of all things, a dragon of legend was upon them.
Maro yelled. "Take cover!" He grabbed his prisoner and yanked the kid along with him as he leapt off his horse, ducking behind a large rock as the dragon swooped overhead.
He cursed his luck. He'd heard the rumours, in passing, stories of a black dragon burning Helgen to the ground. But he hadn't expected those stories to be true, nor that they'd become his reality. Dragons were a myth, used for cheap scares in drunk tavern tales, at most. Except there was undeniably a flesh-and-blood dragon attacking Rorikstead, right now.
The air itself shook as a deafening boom sounded overhead and a blazing jet of fire rained down on the road. From the corner of his eye, Maro noticed his prisoner go stiff and alert—"don't you fucking move," he snapped—but no good; the assassin was already jumping over the rock, with an impressive level of coordination and dexterity for someone whose hands were bound together.
Well, shit, first a dragon attacks and now his prisoner was taking the chance to make a break for it.
Maro drew his bow, engaging in pursuit—but what he saw when he made it over the rock stopped him short of loosing his arrow. Contrary to his expectations, the assassin wasn't in a desperate flight: he only stood in the middle of the road, tracking the dragon as it turned in for another pass. And then—
"Yol!"
The word was scarcely but a whisper, but it resonated with the sky itself, and for a moment it was as if the very universe had stopped to listen. And a beat later, the assassin's breath caught fire.
Maro wasn't the only one to be astonished at the sight. In his peripherals, he could see hold guards and Oculatus agents alike just watching in awe as the miniature inferno shot toward the dragon's head, bright flames licking over its scales. Even the beast itself balked mid-dive, pausing in the air and hesitating for a split second.
A split second was more than enough. Maro shouted, rallying his men. "Now—take it down!" The twang of loosed bowstrings echoed around him as a rain of arrows flew up and pierced the leathery membranes of the dragon's wings, and it crashed to the earth with an enraged roar. Even grounded, it was still a beast, Maro noted with some dismay, as he saw it split a guard in two with a massive claw—but at least it was more vulnerable now than in flight. Maro readied his bow and raised a hand in the air, and gave the signal to attack.
His men rushed forward. In the meantime, he flicked his gaze around the battlefield, trying to locate his godsdamned prisoner.
When he did, he found out that the assassin wasn't done giving him surprises. The kid had run up to the dragon alongside the guards, and Maro caught sight of him just in time to hear him do that… that thing with his voice again. "Krii!" the word rushed out, and the dragon visibly faltered, falling to the ground, like all the life had been sucked out of it. And just when he thought, as the dragon finally died, that the surprises of the day had finally run their course, another one immediately came to prove him wrong, as before his eyes, the beast's corpse began to dissolve. The dragon's flesh sublimated into glowing streamers of energy that looped and curled through the air as they flew at the assassin. The assassin, who was… absorbing them, somehow.
As the last of the energy faded, the earth rumbled and the sky roared with power and the mountains called out,
"Dovahkiin."
Maro had never seen anything like it in his life. It was rather beautiful, in a way, though in the moment he was more concerned than anything. There was no denying the power that was in the air. There was power in the energy ribbons, power in the aura around the assassin, power in those strange words the assassin had spoken.
Just who, and what, had he captured?
Chapter Text
He felt it, somehow, the moment the soldiers slew the dragon, even before its flesh started to burn into ribbons of energy. There was power in the air, and it was pulling at something deep inside him. He drew back in surprise when the energy that was once the dragon rushed at him, responding to the pull.
Memories flashed through his mind, centuries of life in a moment of time: memories of soaring over endless skies; of perching on the highest mountains; of countless fights with mortals and other dov alike; of power rumbling in his throat like when he'd shouted fire earlier, only far stronger—the memories of the dragon, he realized. Its life experiences were now his own; the power it once imbued in its words now strengthened his own Voice.
An unyielding hand landing hard on his shoulder interrupted his moment of contemplation, and Vithsil suppressed the instinctive flinch as he returned his attention to the physical world around him. The hand belonged to that Penitus Oculatus agent—Maro, that was his name, Commander Maro—who was wearing a cold glare on his face, and, well, it didn't take a genius to realize just how damning the circumstances looked.
Vithsil allowed the Commander to pull him roughly to the side of the road as he tried to calculate forward—the prospects of his continued existence had been pretty low all day but this was definitely a new record minimum—first things first, though, don't fight and don't run: for all that the heat of combat had the power to bury reason, Maro had so far proven honorable enough that he probably wouldn't kill a cooperating prisoner.
Although he started to seriously doubt that assessment a moment later, when Maro drew his greatsword in a slow, deliberate manner that was absolutely steeped with threat, and said, coldly, "that better not have been an escape attempt, assassin."
Vithsil couldn't help the flinch this time. He resisted the self-preservation instincts screaming at him to back away from that impressive weapon that looked longer than he was tall—any attempted change in location on his part was bound to be misinterpreted—and rapidly shook his head in denial.
"Then you have some explaining to do." Maro didn't look the least bit mollified. Although, at this point, the fact that Vithsil hadn't been sliced to pieces yet was itself already helping those long term survival odds. Now just to keep it that way, except, how in Oblivion was he supposed to explain whatever had just happened when he himself didn't really know either?
Well, as it happened, someone did know. Slowly, almost reverently, one of the hold guards said to Vithsil, "I can't believe it. You're… Dragonborn."
That didn't ring a bell for Vithsil. He kept his mouth shut, though, fully content to let the Commander take the lead, seeing as whether he'd be allowed to live past today hinged on said Commander's decision. From the brief confusion that crossed Maro's face, he didn't seem to recognize the term either.
"In the very oldest of tales, from back when there were still dragons in Skyrim, the Dragonborn would slay dragons and absorb their power," the guard explained upon seeing their collective blank stares of noncomprehension. "Your prisoner… that's what he just did, isn't it? Absorb the dragon's power?"
Maro's expression shifted into something like he'd been handed an unstable explosive and told to carry it with him and keep it safe, which was… not very encouraging, to say the least. "I just need to know if it makes him too dangerous to hold."
When the guard spoke again there was a touch of trepidation in his voice. "You must have seen him Shout at the dragon earlier—you must have heard the Greybeards' summon. The Voice… I don't know that anyone could hold a man who wields it. I certainly wouldn't try."
Maro only frowned. "I'll take that under advisement. He's still a prisoner of the Penitus Oculatus, though, and I'll deal with him as I see fit."
Not an encouraging turn of phrase, either.
"Yes sir. I'll return to my post."
Once the guard was dismissed, Maro fixed his full, intense attention on Vithsil once more. "Well?"
Vithsil couldn't help the step back this time—he wasn't expecting the Commander to round on him so quickly like that—and as soon as he moved, Maro raised his sword, indeed interpreting the action as the precursor to an escape attempt as Vithsil had calculated earlier, and he really wasn't keen on that blade coming any closer to his body so he forced himself to still once more. He tried to steady his breathing. "I won't run, sir."
He glanced up from the ground, tentatively, when the silence started to stretch thin; it registered that they apparently had an audience, consisting of the other agents on the raid. Maro finally broke the silence with an order, "Arcturus, take the men ahead to Dragon Bridge. I have something to discuss with the prisoner. We'll catch up with you."
"You'll be alright, sir?"
"Just fine. You have your orders."
Arcturus nodded. "Yes sir. You heard the commander. Let's go." He also cast one last dubious glance at Vithsil, but nonetheless followed his orders as given.
Maro took Vithsil by the shoulder again, nudging him in a direction away from the road, "start walking," and it really didn't take a genius to realize what the Commander really wanted was to take them to a more secluded area where it would just be the two of them alone out in the grass, and, oh, this was the part where Maro killed him, wasn't it?
Maro pushed him to his knees and circled around in front of him in an eerily similar manner as back in the Sanctuary. "You'd better have a damn good explanation for what happened back there if you want to keep your head."
Vithsil tore his eyes away from the blade that was really too close for comfort and forced himself to meet Maro's eyes. "I—can't really explain it—when the dragon Shouted, I felt it inside me. I don't know how, but I knew how to use it the moment I heard it. I swear I wasn't trying to escape—that dragon would have killed everyone there and I had to do something to stop it and I had the power."
"If we return to Dragon Bridge," Maro challenged, "you could easily burn the outpost to ashes with that fire breath of yours. That guard was right: I don't know if I can afford to take you prisoner."
Vithsil nodded agreement and after a moment's hesitation admitted quietly, "I can't disagree, sir." And there it was, because there was no denying this power of his that he didn't even know he had until now was strong, stronger than even Festus's spells; he knew it, the Commander knew it, they were both well aware of just how dangerous Vithsil could be now if he decided to be, and even though he didn't want to hurt any of those agents Maro had no reason to trust his word on that.
He shut his eyes and bowed his head, bracing for the fall of the sharp edge that would no doubt take his life in moments. He'd made it further than he thought he would—from the moment he saw Maro cave in Blade-From-Depths' skull against the floor like it was a mildly stubborn egg, he hadn't expected to even leave the Sanctuary alive—and at least this would be quick.
"Gods damn it. You're not going to defend yourself?"
Vithsil dared to glance up again, surprised at the, well, rather incongruous lack of impending doom. What a strange question, and strangely enough, the Commander looked like he was hesitating. Like he was looking for a reason to spare Vithsil's life.
Vithsil shook his head no, a little confused by the whole situation. He was under no illusion as to how damning the circumstances were for him, a Dark Brotherhood assassin who could apparently give a dragon pause with merely a single word, whose captor really had no reason to keep him alive in the first place except that he wasn't much of a threat (which certainly wasn't the case anymore) and plenty of reason to want him dead. If he were in Maro's shoes, he'd probably also decide on a summary execution.
But Maro still wasn't attacking him.
"...sir?" Vithsil warily prompted, after it became apparent the Commander had something to say but wasn't saying it for some reason.
"You could probably kill me, right now, and I wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it."
Vithsil forced himself to fall as still as he could, and didn't say a word. Denying that would be a lie, and confirming it was probably an… unwise idea.
"But you're just kneeling there like you intend to just let me take your head if I so decide, and do nothing about it. Why?"
Vithsil bowed his head, a signal of equal parts respect and submission, because he knew the answer to that question but he had no idea how his answer would be received and there was a high chance it wouldn't be pretty. "We wronged you, sir," he half-whispered. He chanced a glance upward, and—yeah, there it was; he might have missed it if he hadn't been looking for it but the set of the Commander's jaw had definitely hardened; his gaze had grown colder. This topic was hazardous ground to have tread upon.
Maro narrowed his eyes. "And what, exactly," he asked slowly, a dangerous undercurrent of anger turning his words darker, "does a Dark Brotherhood assassin care about Gaius?"
"You didn't deserve what we did to you," Vithsil elaborated before he could stop himself, and, well, now he may as well just say it all and incriminate himself even more completely than he already had, was the protocol his brain was apparently operating under now, because he added, "I only have one life to pay for all the ones I've stolen," and, wonderful; now he's admitted, albeit indirectly, to multiple murders.
"The killer in the murder-cult grows a conscience. Yeah, right. Just when I think I've seen it all," Maro remarked rather sarcastically. "If you really gave a shit about the lives you'd affect by murdering people, you wouldn't have joined them in the first place. Did you really expect me to believe that?"
No, of course not. Vithsil was surprised Maro was even willing to stand there and entertain a conversation in the first place, much less even give consideration to anything Vithsil was saying. "I didn't join them," he protested weakly anyway, not expecting to be believed on that either.
"Oh, yeah? Then how'd you end up one of their members?"
"I hatched there."
"You… hatched there?"
"Yes, sir; Veezara found the egg under the word wall—um, semicircular wall carved in the Dragon language. It taught me krii." Vithsil carefully said the word, preventing any traces of power from entering it. "I have a piece of the shell—"
He reached for the pocket in his robes where he kept the fragment without thinking, and only belatedly realized how much of a terrible idea that was when Maro's blade swung through the air much faster than Vithsil could track it, slicing a new warning into the linen wrap around his neck. He froze, preventing himself from leaning away from the blade and opening his palms in the best approximation he could manage with bound wrists of raising his hands in surrender.
After a long moment, one Vithsil wasn't sure he'd be allowed to live past, the weapon moved away. Maro huffed. "You got a death wish or something? Don't do that."
"Sorry, sir," Vithsil gasped out.
Maro just stared at him appraisingly for a moment, then apparently made some internal decision and resumed his questioning like nothing happened. "You didn't leave them."
"Couldn't," Vithsil corrected, a little shakily. "They would have found out, and I didn't have anywhere to go—I guess it doesn't matter now."
Maro squinted thoughtfully. "Somehow, I believe you," he said finally, and Vithsil could almost sag with relief—almost, but he didn't; he knew better now than to make any sudden moves.
"Alright, come on. Let's get to Dragon Bridge." The Commander gestured for him to stand, and Vithsil cautiously obliged.
He'd survived. For now.
That was progress.
—
Maro didn't know what to think of his prisoner. As he guided the captive assassin back toward the road, he couldn't help but examine his forced travelling companion. The kid certainly wasn't what Maro would've expected.
He'd known for a while that the Brotherhood had in its employ a vampire, who had the physical features of a young child but who was in reality centuries old. What he hadn't known, though, was that they also had a literal teenager in their ranks. There was also no intel regarding the teenager having the ability to—well, Maro wasn't exactly sure how to describe it. Breathe fire? This entire iteration was proving to be rather strange.
Now that the adrenaline and excitement had all finally faded, Maro realized he was feeling quite off-kilter. It felt almost like at some point, without him realizing it, he'd stepped across some invisible line and into an alternate world: a world he didn't understand, where the laws of reality were superficially similar, but fundamentally unalike to the ones he knew. It was an incredibly surreal sensation.
He wasn't particularly fond of it.
He noticed his prisoner was staring at him, surreptitiously, out of the corner of his eye, but staring nonetheless. "Tiid mindoraan?" The assassin mumbled, sounding puzzled.
"What?"
Vithsil startled and gave him a confused look—Maro realized the kid had no idea what he was referring to.
He frowned. "Did you say something?"
Vithsil blinked, and shook his head.
"Oh. Never mind, then," Maro said. That was… strange. Seemed that Vithsil himself hadn't even realized he'd spoken just then, but those foreign words had definitely been spoken in the assassin's voice.
Maro needed more information, he decided. And it seemed like the hold guards would be a good place to start—besides the one who'd directly told Maro about it, he'd definitely sensed that the other guards who'd battled the dragon were also eavesdropping on the conversation. He flagged one down.
"Sir?"
Different guard from before. Maro thought back to his prior conversation—something there had sounded important. "Tell me about the Greybeards."
The Greybeards were certainly an interesting group, as Maro learned. He wasn't particularly looking forward to a trek up the highest mountain in Skyrim, that was for sure, but the old monks did seem like the single most knowledgeable people in the province on the topic of the Dragonborn. And he was getting the sense that if he wanted anything more substantial than ancient legends, he had no choice in the matter except to go hiking.
How exciting.
"By the way, sir, they probably won't admit you to the monastery. Just him."
Even more thrilling. Maro was absolutely opposed to the idea of letting the assassin anywhere that wasn't either Oculatus outpost holding cell or the Castle Dour dungeon, much less on top of a remote mountain.
"I'll keep that in mind."
—
Once the duo reached Dragon Bridge Maro took Vithsil to the outpost basement, where he also unbound the assassin's wrists. It wasn't the most sophisticated place to hold a prisoner—actually, the holding cell there had been entirely improvised. Came with the territory of requisitioning the first 'good enough' unoccupied property that was available.
"Arms out and face the wall. I'm going to search you," he ordered, and was not truly surprised when the assassin quietly complied. He went through the motions of a standard frisk, collecting any items he found on the table in the cell.
Vithsil truly hadn't been carrying any weapons. What Maro ended up with was a small pile of stones—one of which was an octahedral pink gem in a gold box that he was very interested in the origin of—and something that looked the right shape for a piece of eggshell, but certainly wasn't the same material: it was almost crystalline, the color of molasses, with flecks of amber and gold embedded within.
He noticed Vithsil was also watching the collection of confiscated objects with a forlorn expression. "Sorry," he said, "standard procedure."
Vithsil nodded. Maro collected the items in an evidence box and left the cell, locking the door behind him. Vaguely, it registered in his mind that Vithsil hadn't moved at all, even to bring his arms down to a more comfortable position, until said door was locked.
Well. That should hold the assassin for the night, while Maro figured out what exactly he'd do next—whether he'd further investigate this 'Dragonborn' stuff or just stick with his original mission.
He himself also chose to spend the night in the outpost for the first time in a long time. Just so he could keep an eye on things. In case his prisoner tried something stupid.
It was only later, as he lay sleepless in the dark, that Maro realized something that really should have caught his attention earlier.
The loop hadn't reset.
Notes:
Civil engineering with LSF: I'm giving the outpost a basement because it should have one anyway because the soil definitely freezes in Skyrim and foundations need to go below the frost line
Chapter 10: Mountain Folds
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Maro awoke the next morning to find that Dragon Bridge was not in fact engulfed by wildfire, the outpost had not in fact been reduced to piles of smoking embers, and Vithsil had not in fact tried to escape. When Maro descended to the basement to run a status check, he found the assassin still there, kneeling on the floor with hands splayed and fingertips resting on the floor.
Also, apparently, news had spread about the whole 'Dragonborn' incident. Seemed it was a bigger deal than Maro had first assumed—when he collected the daily intelligence reports, they quickly made it apparent that Vithsil had attracted the attention of quite a few people, including, of all people, the Stormcloak leader, among others.
The last thing Maro needed right now was the attention of quite a few people, including important figures. There were still remnants of the Brotherhood somewhere out there; not to mention, even if the assassin cult was eradicated, threats still existed from other places. Like the Stormcloaks. Maro really didn't like the fact that Ulfric was one of the parties that was interested in his prisoner.
An abrupt movement on Vithsil's part caught Maro's attention and cut off that train of thought. The assassin had raised his head and was now watching the stairs that led up to the ground level.
A moment later Maro heard the sounds of a commotion coming from those same stairs. Arcturus's voice stood out to him, as well as another female voice Maro didn't recognize.
"I'm afraid that decision is up to the Commander, not me—hey, you can't go down there, that area's restricted—!"
The sound of blades being drawn had Maro hastening up the stairwell, where he saw on the upper landing Arcturus and two other agents surrounding a hooded woman, all parties with swords out.
He had to take control of the situation. "What's going on here?"
"Commander." Arcturus saluted with his off hand. "She's demanding to see the prisoner. She claims to be a member of the Blades."
"The Blades were disbanded over two decades ago."
That seemed to offend the hooded woman, who interjected before Arcturus could say anything. "Officially. The Blades were officially disbanded 26 years ago. But we're not that easy to get rid of. While your 'Penitus Oculatus' was playing around at what we used to do, I've kept an eye on the Thalmor and the dragons. Now, Commander, can we get to business?"
Oh, this was going to be a headache to deal with, wasn't it?
"Agents, stand down. I'll take it from here. You're dismissed."
The Blade watched them leave. Only after the door to the ground level shut behind Arcturus did she finally speak again. "Finally. I don't want to waste your time or mine, so I'll keep this short. I need to see your prisoner." She tried to push past him—he sidestepped so he was still directly in front of her.
"For what purpose?"
"I need to determine whether he really is Dragonborn."
"And how do you intend to do that?"
"That's not your concern. Just give him to me. This is a Blades matter."
"Absolutely not. He's our prisoner, not some traveller who happens to be in our basement. He stays here."
Indignation ignited in her eyes, and she once again tried to get past him. Maro drew his sword. "Stand down."
She glared but seemed unwilling to engage with him in combat. "This isn't over," she threatened. "You'll be hearing from us."
"Yes, I'm sure we will. Leave or I'll have you arrested for trespassing."
Thankfully, she actually left. Maro was seriously considering the possibility of a fight there. That Blades agent was belligerent, he could tell just by looking at her. And he had no doubt he'd see her again.
—
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
Maro hated when situations were outside his control. He was a plotter and a schemer—he thrived when he had knowledge of all the variables, a means to control them, and a contingency plan for every outcome. But right now?
Loathe as he was to admit it, he was out of his depth.
The good news was, he already knew the best solution to this issue. The bad news was, it would involve dragging a demonstrably dangerous prisoner along a treacherous hike up the highest mountain in Skyrim. He was hoping he wouldn't have to, but to get ahead of everyone else he'd have to eliminate this information disadvantage—he'd have to speak with these 'Greybeards'.
That was why he was currently preparing for such an outing, all the while cursing the fact that he had to do it at all. Not to mention the elephant in the room—the question of how, exactly, he was going to take the Dragonborn with him.
Abruptly, Maro realized he was being stupid. He did have a solution to the whole Shouting problem; it just hadn't seemed entirely applicable at first glance. But based on his research the underlying power was the same. If General Tullius was able to neuter Ulfric Stormcloak's Voice by simply gagging the man, the same principle should apply to Maro's prisoner. That simplified things.
Maro double-checked his gear—sword, dagger, bow and arrows, tent, bedrolls, provisions, emergency medical supplies. All good.
He summoned Arcturus in the main area of the outpost. "I need to go on an expedition. It may take me away from Dragon Bridge for several days."
"Understood, sir. If I may ask, what exactly will you be doing?"
"I'm looking for more information on that 'Dragonborn' phenomenon that happened in Rorikstead. That's not what's important right now. The Dark Brotherhood will be making an attempt on Vittoria Vici's life during her wedding. I need you to take charge of security there, in the event I haven't returned by then."
"I'll make the preparations, sir."
Maro nodded. "Good. I've already identified some of the potential major vulnerabilities." He quickly scrawled down a list of possible scenarios and handed it to Arcturus. "Of course, assume this isn't a complete list. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious." "Of course, sir." Arcturus took the paper and saluted sharply.
That was one more thing out of the way. Now all there was left to do was to fetch the prisoner.
—
"Stand and face the back of the cell," Maro ordered as he stepped down from the last step into the basement. By the time he'd gotten around to unlocking and opening the door, the assassin had already complied with the instruction.
Maro wasn't sure whether the continued cooperation of his prisoner was reassuring or if it just put him more on edge, he thought to himself, as he bound Vithsil's wrists together.
"Open your mouth. I'm going to gag you."
Again, the assassin just did exactly as ordered. In the process of wrapping the cloth, Maro caught a glimpse of sharp little fangs. Was all the unusual anatomy related to this 'Dragonborn' status? Maro would have to ask when he reached the Greybeards.
"Walk with me," he ordered, stepping aside and gesturing for Vithsil to go before him. There was a flash of fear in the assassin's eyes for a moment, but he cautiously exited the cell nonetheless.
And so they commissioned a carriage and departed for Ivarstead to climb a mountain.
By the time they'd reached the plains of central Skyrim, the assassin's curiosity had grown greater than his fear. Maro watched him glancing rapidly around, taking in their surroundings.
"Ivarstead," Maro informed his prisoner. "We're going to the Greybeards' monastery."
Night was falling by the time they arrived in Ivarstead, and Maro realized that scaling the mountain would have to wait until the next day. Ivarstead didn't have anything resembling a prison, though—Maro would have to settle for camping or renting a room at the inn.
He decided on the inn. That way, at least there'd be other people around to alert the guards if the assassin tried to pull anything.
—
The two of them departed early the next morning. Maro wanted to make the most of the available daylight, especially since he already figured climbing the mountain would probably take the entire day, at least.
At the trailhead, Maro overheard a snippet of conversation from another hiker, who mentioned having done the climb multiple times before. He approached the man, waiting for the conversation to end, and decided to take the opportunity to get a sense of what lay ahead.
The man was called Klimmek, he learned, and ran deliveries of long-lasting food supplies up the mountain.
"Although," Klimmek mentioned offhand, "my legs aren't way they used to be. And climbing the 7,000 Steps takes its toll."
Maro nodded. "Anything we should be on the lookout for?"
"The occasional wolf pack or stray, I suppose, but that's all I've ever had to deal with." Klimmek glanced at Maro's sword. "Doubt there's anything that would be a problem for the likes of you. Besides that? Just watch your footing. The wintry conditions can make the stairs treacherously slippery."
Vithsil waved a hand gently at that moment to catch Klimmek's attention. Then he pointed to the sack of supplies, then himself, mimed carrying something, and finally pointed up the mountain.
Was he—?
"Oh, would you? That's kind of you," said Klimmek, passing over the sack. "At the top of the steps you'll see the offering chest. Just place the bag inside and you're done."
He was.
Vithsil took the bag, slinging it over his back, and gave Klimmek a bright nod. It elicited a chuckle, and Klimmek turned to Maro and said, "he doesn't seem all that bad."
Maro refused to respond to that with anything more than a neutral hum.
"Anyway," said Klimmek, "be careful up there."
"We will," said Maro. "Thank you for the information."
—
Climbing the 7,000 Steps was every part as difficult as Maro imagined it would be. More so, even. As the average height of trees by the trail grew shorter and patches of snow became visible over the ground, he started to feel very glad he'd brought a week's worth of supplies, because it was seeming like they'd need all of it. Mostly because of him. The illustrious 52 years of life behind him were really making themselves known.
Meanwhile, Vithsil seemed to be perfectly at home, and was even pulling ahead of Maro regularly during the climb, to the point that the assassin was fairly frequently stopping and waiting for Maro to catch up.
It wasn't lost on Maro that he wouldn't stand a chance catching the assassin if Vithsil decided to try to slip custody up on that mountain. But his concern didn't manifest. Quite the contrary, actually: every so often, Maro could see Vithsil glance backward as though monitoring the distance between them—as though he didn't want that distance to grow too large.
Maro was glad for it, even if he didn't understand why the assassin apparently had no intention of trying to escape.
The first night on the mountain, he decided to ask about it after they made camp. He unwrapped the gag and set it aside for the moment, and then asked, "Why're you staying, anyway?"
Vithsil looked up at him from the corner of the tent he was seated in, caught off-guard by the question. "…sir?"
Maro took a seat next to the assassin. "I think we both realize I don't have a shadow of a chance of catching you if you run."
"I won't, sir."
"Yes, you said that the day I captured you. What I'm asking now is why?"
The assassin curled into himself. "I deserve this," he answered quietly. "I'm a murderer."
"No one else in your cult seemed to have an issue with that."
"They're different. They don't think about—they don't care about—"
Maro frowned, and prompted, "about what?"
"The contracts, the targets, they were people too—they had aspirations, and dreams, and people who loved them—" Vithsil sobbed, and Maro realized he was crying now, as though that one question had cracked through an unsteady wall that had been holding back an outpour of, apparently, guilt. "I killed them—I stole their time. Now it's all gone. There's no way for me to give it back."
Maro made the decision almost automatically. He laid a hand on Vithsil's shoulder; not domineering, or commanding, just… there. He wasn't sure why he was trying to comfort a contract murderer, but it felt wrong not to. He decided not to examine his motivations too closely. For his own sanity.
Vithsil raised his head momentarily to stare at the hand. "…sir?"
Maro let out a heavy sigh and refused to elaborate.
A moment later he felt a marginal increase in pressure against that hand, and he realized the kid was—ever so fractionally—leaning into the touch.
"…thank you, sir," Vithsil murmured, dropping his head into his arms.
For close to an hour, Maro just sat there unmoving, maintaining that small gesture of comfort as the kid silently cried. The evening around them was tranquilly still, interrupted only by Vithsil's occasional sob.
Eventually, the kid grew calmer. "Sorry, sir," he mumbled into his sleeve, and drew away.
"There's no need for that," said Maro.
"Yes, sir. I—I'll be okay. You should get some rest. I'm sorry for keeping you so long."
"Just—drop it," Maro said, and changed the topic. "I am going to have to gag you again for the night."
"Yes, sir."
Maro replaced the gag—he still didn't trust the assassin with that Voice thing, emotional moment notwithstanding—and turned in for another night of hoping not to be backstabbed in his sleep.
The next morning came uneventfully. Maro packed up the camping supplies. Vithsil offered to carry some of them using Klimmek's bag, apparently simply because he could handle the additional weight and he didn't want Maro to fall behind too far.
Neither of them mentioned what had happened the previous evening.
—
When the unorthodox pair finally passed through the grand, heavy doors of the monastery, they were greeted by an elderly monk who quickly glanced between the two of them before fixing his gaze on the Commander. Maro got the impression that he'd somehow offended the man.
"This place is not for you," the monk said.
"Yes, I'm aware," said Maro, nodding acknowledgement toward Vithsil standing next to him. "But I'm going to insist that I stay with him."
"We have no obligation to permit you in these halls."
"I have no obligation to release my prisoner. Are you going to force the matter?"
Not even for a moment did the monk's calm demeanor slip, even in the face of that heated challenge. "No," he replied. "That is not the purpose of the Voice."
That more than anything gave Maro pause. This was, perhaps, the first time in a while he wasn't getting the feeling that a disagreement was about to turn into a fight. The monk's answer stood in stark contrast with that of the Blade who had invaded the outpost earlier.
"Besides," said the monk, "I suspect you have your own motive for coming."
"So what if I do?"
"Then I ask you what that motive is."
Oh. That's easy: "I need to know how to protect my men, and safeguard the Emperor."
Maro suddenly felt… examined, by the monk's gaze. After not too long, he was posed another question.
"And what role does the Dragonborn play in this mission?"
"He's an assassin. Part of the 'guild' plotting to murder the Emperor. I captured him in a raid on their Sanctuary."
Once again the monk didn't immediately reply, and Maro again had the sense he was being studied.
"Very well," the monk said at last, "you may accompany him. I am Master Arngeir. I speak for the Greybeards."
"Commander Valerus Maro. And he's Vithsil."
A moment of awkward silence.
Arngeir cleared his throat. "Would you mind undoing his binds, Commander?"
Reluctantly, Maro agreed, "fine," and removed the gag preventing the assassin from speaking.
"Dragonborn," Arngeir greeted Vithsil, now apparently content to completely ignore Maro, "welcome to High Hrothgar. Come: we will see if you truly have the gift. Let us taste of your voice."
Vithsil looked a little bewildered, and a little panicked.
"You will not harm us," Arngeir reassured. "Do not be afraid."
Vithsil hesitated for a moment longer, and then did that thing with his voice again. "Fus," he said in hardly more than a whisper, that still sent a ripple of power through the air.
Arngeir was entirely unaffected. Maro was starting to think the man was some kind of immovable object. The monk just nodded.
"Dragonborn. It truly is you. Welcome to High Hrothgar."
The monk was joined by three of his colleagues. Maro spectated from the sidelines as the Greybeards taught Vithsil a second word that could apparently be paired with 'Fus' to give the Shout more power, and then took the assassin through an exercise hitting targets with the words. Then he had to stand outside in the cold, thin air of the top of a mountain and try not to freeze to death as the monks gave Vithsil yet another word that let the assassin make straight dashes. Eventually they tasked Vithsil with retrieving a relic of theirs from an old Nordic tomb. Supposedly, the kid showed 'great promise.'
Maro wasn't sure exactly how he felt about a potential threat showing 'great promise,' but it certainly wasn't a positive feeling. It was incredible to him how the Greybeards treated the assassin so… normally.
As they made ready to depart, Maro, curious, asked that very question to Arngeir.
"To guide the Dragonborn is our privilege and our duty," the monk answered, "no matter what path he chooses. The Dragon Blood is a gift from Akatosh. We will try to show him the way of peace and balance, but it is his choice how to use his gift."
"And what if he chooses to murder people with it?"
"Then we will have been unsuccessful."
"Really? That's it?"
Arngeir nodded serenely. "Time will judge him."
Maro could not believe what he was hearing, but on the other hand it did seem an in-character response for the monk. It probably wasn't worth arguing the matter, either. Instead, he decided to try to get the other answer he'd been seeking.
"What about his physical features—hey, Vithsil, hood down—do they have anything to do with being Dragonborn?"
Vithsil approached Arngeir and lowered his hood, revealing the faint scales and the small horns. For the first time that day, the monk actually looked mildly surprised.
His answer, when it came, was almost reverent. "Dovah."
Maro resisted the urge to sigh. "In Cyrodiilic, please?"
"These are aspects of Dragons," Arngeir told Vithsil, ignoring Maro again. But it did sort of indirectly answer Maro's question. "This is truly the turning of an age. As you forge your path, I can only ask this of you: use your gift wisely, Dovahkiin."
Vithsil took one of Arngeir's hands in both of his own and nodded, a gesture that was equal parts solemn and earnest.
"Thanks for the information," Maro said, feeling a little disconcerted. He'd gained quite a bit of information coming here, but a new question had also arisen: was it worth the additional risk?
He was surprised to find that he wasn't so much on edge now as he was before, in the aftermath of the dragon fight in Rorikstead, though. Somehow, despite the fact that the assassin had become more powerful, Maro felt less threatened by him. It didn't make much sense. He'd have to contemplate it further.
Later, though. And inside a building. Maro had no idea how the Greybeards managed to meditate out here in this freezing air.
—
It was after the monks went back inside that Vithsil suddenly sat down on the steps leading up to the monastery's back patio, burying his head in his hands. The assassin let out a breathy, helpless laugh, almost bordering on hysterical.
"Now you're really going to kill me."
Maro frowned. "Where's this coming from?"
Vithsil raised his head slightly to look at his own hands. "You should. I'm dangerous," he sobbed, and dropped his head again.
Maro found himself sitting down as well next to Vithsil. He wasn't exactly sure why he did it—in the moment, though, he didn't see a killer or a threat, just a child afraid of not only his jailer but also his own power.
"No," Maro sighed, "I'm not going to kill you for this."
"I-I don't understand. Why are you being so merciful?"
"I could say the same to you. You have all this power, so why haven't you tried to escape, or avenge your 'Family,' or any other thing I would have expected from one of your colleagues? You haven't—you haven't done anything."
"I—don't want to hurt anyone else." Vithsil sniffled.
Maro made a noncommittal sound, refusing to indicate either belief or skepticism. "You're not what I expected."
"I… apologize?"
Despite everything, the absurdity of that one sentence made Maro laugh. Here was the supposed cold-hearted Dark Brotherhood assassin, apologizing to him for not meeting that description. Vithsil looked at him with a bewildered expression, which he waved off. "In a good way," he said automatically, surprising himself with those words.
Vithsil ducked his head and looked away. "Thank you, sir."
"Hm. Yes, well. Mind having the emotional moment inside the monastery, though? It's damn cold out here and it's only getting colder."
"Sorry," Vithsil said, scrambling to his feet. It registered in Maro's mind that the kid held the door open for him on the way back inside. It was a strangely considerate gesture, yet another reason on that pile he was ignoring, of reasons to reevaluate the assassin.
He found that the idea was also not as objectionable as he would have expected.
He had to think.
Well, it just so happened that he was in a place very conducive to thinking, and would probably have to spend the night there, because it was far too late in the day to begin the descent hike.
Obtaining permission to stay for the night was relatively straightforward. At least, once Vithsil was the one to ask for it. Arngeir showed the two of them to an alcove-like room containing two beds, next to the main sleeping area.
Maro laid on the bed he'd been allocated for the night, staring up at but not seeing the stone of the ceiling above him. His thoughts lingered on the young assassin who was his prisoner, who was quickly becoming a much larger part of his life than he'd anticipated.
What a conundrum the assassin was proving to be, Maro thought to himself, as he considered the two conflicting images in his head. There was the faceless murderer of the Dark Brotherhood, clad in black with a knife quick at the ready. This was the type of person who poisoned the Emperor's dinner, who dropped an unsteady gargoyle on a bride at her wedding. Who slit the throat of a son right in front of his father.
And then there was Vithsil, with his bright eyes and earnest acts of kindness; Vithsil, who offered to deliver a bag of supplies up a mountain on behalf of a man who couldn't make the trek himself, who took up part of the load of Maro's camping supplies because he could handle the additional weight, who spent the better part of an hour one evening crying through the guilt of his past deeds.
When Maro looked at him, he wanted to see the faceless Dark Brotherhood assassin, to see the black-and-red robes and stop there. Part of him still did. It was simpler that way, easier that way, easier to see only the monsters who'd killed his son and to hate and to rage.
And yet. Vithsil was more than that, and Maro knew it.
Perhaps sparing his life wasn't the mistake Maro kept thinking it was.
Damn it.
The Penitus Oculatus taught its agents not to get attached to other people in their line of work. Maro had historically, between his wife and his son, not been the most ardent follower of that advice.
And now, if he wasn't careful, he might end up attached to his prisoner.
What a disaster his life was turning out to be.
Notes:
Don't mind me missing my own self-set deadlines
Chapter 11: Blank White Paper
Chapter Text
The next morning, when he awoke, Maro noticed Vithsil was no longer in the room.
That almost would have been impressive if it wasn't so concerning. Maro had always been a light sleeper, and had taken the bed next to the entrance of the room with the thinking that he'd be roused from sleep if the assassin tried to leave, as the only way to exit the room was to pass that bed.
Maro grabbed his weapon and stormed out towards the main hall, resigned to the fact that he was probably going to have to do some hunting.
That hunt didn't last very long, because, as it turned out, Vithsil was in the main hall. The assassin appeared to have been meditating, but exited the trance and looked over the moment Maro entered the hall. "Sir," he greeted warily, evidently registering the hostility still in Maro's posture.
Maro forced himself to stand down. "Don't wander off like that. Ready to leave?"
Vithsil nodded, and asked, a little warily, "are we retrieving the Horn?"
The relics the Greybeards had tasked him with bringing back. Right.
…what was the worst that could happen? Besides, well, having to climb the damn mountain again.
"Sure, why not," Maro finally decided, then muttered under his breath, "need to find me a battlemage who knows mark-recall…"
Descending the mountain was quicker than ascending, but also felt more physically demanding. Maro's knees were aching by the time he reached Ivarstead. And according to the most current maps, Ustengrav was another two days' worth of travel away. At least that trip could be done on horseback.
"You didn't bind me, sir," Vithsil pointed out carefully on the road, a few hours into the journey.
"I didn't," Maro agreed in a flat tone. "What of it?"
A little bit of challenge had crept into the question. In the edge of his vision, Maro saw Vithsil drop his head as though chastised. "I apologize if I overstepped."
Maro paused. "You didn't," he said after a moment, and repeated his question. "So, what of it?"
"…why not?"
Maro hummed thoughtfully. "Maybe I'm waiting for you to do something that gives me a reason to kill you."
"Sir—"
"No, I'm sorry," Maro interrupted quickly, "that was unnecessary." He frowned to himself. It seemed his emotional control was fraying as of late. Then again, could one really blame him? Assassins just like Vithsil were the ones who took Gaius from him, and now he was… escorting one around, unbound and unfettered.
But he glanced behind himself again and caught sight again of the slump of Vithsil's shoulders, the bowing of his head. And somehow, he wanted to believe that contrition.
"Because you seem genuine in your desire to make amends," he finally explained. "So I'm giving you a chance to prove it. Squander it and you'll find yourself right back under my sword, and I won't stay my hand a second time."
"I wouldn't expect you to, sir."
"Glad we understand each other."
—
The ground passed quickly, with the majority of the journey being on established roads on the relatively flat terrain of the Whiterun Hold plains, though they still had to make camp for a night midway. Near the last stretch, as they left the road to approach the place the maps indicated Ustengrav was located, the ground grew muddier with the swampwaters of Morthal. Maro disembarked and gestured for Vithsil to follow suit once it became clear that continuing would risk getting the carriage stuck.
It wasn't too difficult to narrow down the location after that, because just a few minutes into the basic search pattern, they were waylaid by a pair of bandits camped out at the entrance of a stone ruin. Dispatching them wasn't very difficult.
The entrance to Ustengrav was… underwhelming.
Maro had seen plenty like it. The old Nordic tombs seemed to be ubiquitous across the province. Though, initially, he'd expected a place as illustrious-sounding as the Tomb of Jurgen Windcaller to have a more interesting exterior, perhaps like those of Labyrinthian or Korvanjund, but instead it was just… a hole in the ground. He descended down a staircase of worn stone slabs into a wide but shallow circular pit, and a nondescript metal door awaited at the bottom.
Maro looked at Vithsil, who just gave a single nod back. And then he was slowly pushing the door open, revealing the depths of the tomb beyond.
He crept inside slowly, making use of the long-unexecised but still intact stealth training every field received. Vithsil's steps beside him were eerily silent in a manner that left no doubt about the kid's past. Maro pretended it didn't disquiet him and did his best not to let it distract him.
The sounds of a fight echoed faintly in the distance. Maro could make out the distinctive crackle of shock spells, though not much else carried distinctly enough through the narrow halls to be identifiable. One thing was clear, though: he should expect hostilities.
The sounds of the fight faded after a minute, and Maro finally padded closer to the room they'd been coming from, ready to engage with whoever the victor had been.
He didn't expect undead. That's what he got, though—the mummified corpses of the ancient Nords buried there, reanimated now and evidently prepared to eject the new intruders in the tomb that were Maro and Vithsil.
"Aav dilon!"
Maro suddenly found himself wondering whether Gaius could reanimate like that.
The reminder that he was still in a fight came in the form of a loud clash of metal against metal as Vithsil slipped past him and met the closer draugr's falling blade with a steel dagger. He quickly refocused on the fight, quickly taking out the second draugr as Vithsil dealt with the first one.
The tomb took them rather impressively deep, with more draugr and skeletons guarding it the whole way down. Occasionally, Vithsil would stop and root around in one of the scattered chests throughout the ruin, usually returning empty-handed except for a few occasions where Maro saw him pocketing what looked like gemstones. He'd had a lot of those in his possession when he was captured, Maro recalled. Perhaps there was some inkling of truth in the stories of dragons hoarding riches.
Eventually the narrow tunnels opened into an expansive multilayer underground cavern that even had trees growing in it, under the daylight streaming in through a hole in the cavern ceiling far above. Maro stood upon the first of a series of high platforms that perhaps once led to another doorway set in a wall on the other side of the cavern, but the stone bridges that had once connected them were long since crumbled. It seemed like the only way forward was to descend to the next layer down, where a natural stone arch formed a bridge spanning over the deepest part of the cavern to another room with three stone structures and another gated doorway.
Maro glanced at Vithsil. "Seems like the only way forward is down there," he commented, gesturing at the gated doorway.
The kid nodded in agreement, but he looked distinctly distracted.
Maro followed his gaze and spotted the semicylindrical wall set next to the waterfall in the lowest layer of the cavern. Something similar had been in the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary, he recalled. There was something else, too—hadn't Vithsil claimed to have learned one of those Shouts from the wall in the sanctuary?
"I hear its whisper," Vithsil explained when he noticed that Maro was examining him. "The Word of Power. If you don't mind, may I…?"
"Yeah. Fine. Go ahead," Maro decided. Part of him was curious about how the whole process worked, anyway.
So he followed the kid along the trek down to the wall.
Once the two of them arrived at the floor of the cavern, Vithsil walked into the recess of the wall as if entranced, staring at the claw-like symbols carved into the stone. One group of symbols started to glow faintly, and ribbons of energy like those from the slain dragon stretched out from the word and wrapped around the assassin. Maro felt no wind, but could hear something whooshing in the air.
Moments later, it stopped, and the energy faded from the air, leaving the cavern in tranquility once more. Vithsil breathed deeply. "Ready to continue, sir."
"So what did that one say?" Maro asked casually while they were crossing the arch.
"Feim," recited Vithsil, but without doing whatever thing injected the words with power. "Fade."
"And what does it do?" Maro probed a little further.
"It… lets me fade. I cannot harm, but neither can I be harmed."
"What, like a ghost?"
"I suppose so, sir."
"That sounds useful." And dangerous. It meant the assassin had a clean escape method if he decided to run. None of Maro's agents would be able to stop him by force. Then again, 'dangerous' was starting to become a theme when it came to Vithsil.
The first small stone pillar in the room across the natural bridge glowed the moment Maro neared it, and
When either of them stood near a glowing stone, the corresponding one of the gates was slid open. But evidently they were on some kind of timer, because they closed again in a matter of seconds after leaving the strange proximity-sensing stones.
But then, how was one meant to—
Remain true to the Way of the Voice…
Oh.
Maro saw the assassin take a silent inhale of breath.
"Hey. Hey. No, we're not doing this. You're staying with me."
The look Vithsil gave him was apologetic.
Things moved very quickly before Maro really could react. He found himself wrapped in a tight hug, and then the kid Shouted and Maro's senses were flooded entirely with the air rushing past him in a harsh wind and the world blurring as it zoomed past his eyes. He still hadn't registered what had happened by the time the Shout ended and he arrived at the gates—which were all three still open—feeling like he'd just been run into by a bear.
"Come on," said Vithsil, pulling Maro along as he sprinted through the doors. They barely made it through to the other side—Maro dove through the final gate right as it began to fall again.
A beat of silence passed.
And then like the punchline of a bad joke, all three gates slowly slid open again behind them, and stayed there this time.
"Well." Maro coughed awkwardly. "That was a bit… unnecessarily dramatic."
Vithsil shrugged sheepishly.
Traversing the remaining segments of the ruin was comparatively uneventful, and it wasn't much longer before Maro and Vithsil found themselves crossing a wide bridge to a lone coffin. As they approached it, huge stone statues rose from the water at their sides as if witnessing them.
A single stone hand rose from the top of the coffin, cupped around… a slip of paper?
Maro grabbed it and unfolded it, revealing handwritten words on the inside. A note, addressed to the Dragonborn, with instructions to travel to Riverwood and rent a specific room at the inn there.
Wordlessly, Maro let his head fall back in exasperation as he handed the note to Vithsil. He released a heavy sigh.
At least they'd pass through that town anyway on the return trip to Ivarstead. Small mercies.
In the hallway behind the sarcophagus sat one more ornate chest, which Vithsil also looked inside.
What the assassin pulled out this time weren't previous gems, though, nor were they anything Maro would have expected. Vithsil straightened with a bundle of fabric in his arms—ancient robes coated in a fine veneer of dust, somewhat reminiscent of those of the Greybeards, likely dating back to the founding of the monk order. He held the article up in the air in front of him, and simply stared for a moment.
And then it passed. He hastily folded the fabric into his pack, before resuming down the hallway beyond the chest.
Just like that, the duo found themselves back on the surface, still down one Horn, with nothing to show for their search but some cryptic directions to Riverwood.
At least the next move was obvious.
—
"I'd like to rent the attic room," Vithsil said to the innkeeper, and set down a small bag of gold gently on the counter.
"Well," she said, "we don't have an attic room, but you can take the one on the left." And Maro, from where he was sitting in plainclothes surreptitiously eavesdropping, realized he recognized that voice.
It was that Blades agent that came storming into the Oculatus outpost the other day.
He watched in the edges of his vision as Vithsil entered into the room, and the innkeeper followed him in. Only a few minutes later, though, they exited again together, crossing to a room on the other side of the inn.
Maro quickly followed and caught the door on their tail before it could fully shut. "What are you doing?"
Vithsil jumped. "Not you," Maro quickly clarified.
Vithsil relaxed, but stayed backed up against the nearest wall. Meanwhile, the look the Blades agent gave Maro was pure venom.
"Stay out of this," she snapped.
Maro crossed his arms and made clear he had no intention of leaving. "No. Vithsil is my prisoner. Anything that concerns him concerns me, Blades or no Blades."
"Shut up," she hissed. "Do you want everyone to hear you? Do they not teach our replacements to be discreet?"
"You brought us here," Maro pointed out.
"Him. Not you."
"He stays with me."
The Blade glared at him, but finally relented. "Fine. Close the door behind you and follow me."
Maro shut the door to the room. The moment that was done, the Blade revealed a tunnel behind a false panel in the wardrobe and descended into it. Maro gestured for Vithsil to proceed in front of him.
At the bottom of the staircase was quite a well-furnished little hideout, complete with training dummies and shelves of spare weapons and armor. The Blade circled around to the other side of the table in the center, setting down a hollow horn on it in the process before leaning over the map on the table surface. "Looking for this, I presume?"
Vithsil tentatively approached just close enough to be able to reach the artifact, and retreated back to where Maro was standing near the tunnel mouth once he had it.
"Relax," said the Blade, rolling her eyes. "I'm not your enemy. Although it seems your 'friend' there disagrees. But anyway. You're the one who the Greybeards think is Dragonborn?"
Vithsil nodded.
"Delphine. A pleasure," she introduced herself, sounding decidedly like she saw it as the opposite. "I hope they're right, but I hope you'll forgive me if I don't assume something's true just because the Greybeards said it was. I just handed you the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller—does that make me Dragonborn too?"
Maro interrupted. "You still haven't explained why, exactly, you're so interested in this matter. I suggest you start."
"I don't owe anything to you," she snapped. "I'm only doing this because of the Dragonborn. There's something most people don't remember. But we do. He's the only one who can kill a dragon permanently by devouring its soul."
"Oh, I noticed," said Maro drily.
"So it's true then? You can consume a dragon's soul?" The question was posed to Vithsil. Delphine seemed to be listening to Maro's words but uninterested in any of his potential input.
"I… suppose so," the kid answered after a long pause.
"Good. You'll have a chance to prove it soon enough. Listen. The dragons weren't just gone somewhere all these past centuries. They disappeared because the Blades—my predecessors—hunted them down and killed them. And now they're coming back to life."
Maro and Vithsil shared the same question. "What?"
Delphine recited something that sounded like a poem, that mentioned a World-Eater and a Last Dragonborn. "Alduin is back," she explained, "Alduin the World-Eater, and he's resurrecting his vassals to restore the Dragon Cult. You," she jabbed a finger at Vithsil, "need to stop him."
Vithsil took a quick step back with a rapid shake of his head.
"Oh, please. Now's not the time to play the reluctant hero," the Blade said impatiently. "Make a choice. Are you with us or not? Are you in or are you out?"
Vithsil hissed out through his teeth, and finally answered, "I'm out."
Maro wished he could immortalize the offended expression on Delphine's face in his memory. "You're going to regret this," she replied with venom in her voice. "You'll be begging for my help when Alduin descends."
Maro didn't bother to reply. "We're leaving."
—
As a final stop on this long journey, Maro and Vithsil returned to High Hrothgar to return the Greybeards' artifact. Arngeir was much pleased, and taught Vithsil the last word to the Shout he called 'Unrelenting Force,' before gathering the other Greybeards to formally recognize the kid as Dragonborn. Maro was asked for his own safety to leave the monastery and wait outside for that portion. Judging from the slight tremors running through the ground beneath his feet and the rumbling sounds propagating all the way to where he stood near the offering chest, it had probably been a wise decision to acquiesce.
Minutes later, Vithsil joined him. Maro noticed immediately that he'd finally gotten around to changing his wardrobe, and was now sporting the pale slate-grey robes he'd found in Ustengrav. They were… quite different from the Dark Brotherhood's idea of fashion. The hem of the darker grey cloak around his shoulders, somewhat tattered by age, formed drifting trails behind him in the wind like lingering echoes, and the hood sat almost like an act of defiance—crafted from white fabric, white as the snow atop the mountains, that seemed to shine in the morning sun as bright as a promise.
Perhaps that was exactly what it represented.
—
It was when they were just entering the region that could reasonably be called the vicinity of Dragon Bridge, and Maro had just pulled to the side of the road to camp through the night, that he noticed a small figure walking along the road from the direction they were heading toward.
Was that a child?
What was a child doing alone on the road at night?
Maro frowned, and made to approach—but Vithsil suddenly jumped down beside him, reaching out and snagging hold of his arm.
Maro's initial reaction was to shoot a sharp warning look at the assassin beside him, but the look on Vithsil's face gave him pause. It made him briefly wonder if there was a hagraven or something in that same direction that he couldn't see for some reason, but then he realized that hostile expression was directed at the little girl.
He didn't get a chance to say anything, though, before the girl charged. Far faster than he would have expected from what looked like a ten-year-old child, she had closed the distance and was pouncing at Maro, and when he saw the glowing red eyes and the fanged mouth opened unnaturally wide it finally clicked. Vampire. This must be Babette, then, the mysterious bloodsucking assassin who took advantage of her innocent appearance to kill. And this was an assassination attempt. With Maro as the target.
In a way, he was flattered. The Dark Brotherhood had never personally tried to kill him before, despite how many times they ruined him. He must have really pissed them off this time.
Maro scrambled to the side just moments before she would have been on him, but she landed deftly and changed direction in an instant, and just like that Maro found himself on the back foot. Distance. He needed to get distance, but the vampire wasn't giving it to him—she was way too fast.
Then there was a yell. No, wait—a Shout.
"Fus!"
And Babette might have been a centuries-old vampire, but she still had the body of a ten-year old girl, and the force of the Shout sent her easily to the ground. Seemingly out of nowhere, Vithsil pounced on her with a fierce hiss, and the two of them tussled as they struggled for the upper hand in the brawl. Maro considered intervening, a few times, during the course of the fight, but the two combatants were moving so quickly and chaotically that he didn't receive an opening before it was already over.
Eventually Vithsil managed to overpower her, pinning her prone with one hand braced against the back of her neck and the other holding both of her hands in place.
"Traitor," Babette snarled, her voice so full of malice that it immediately broke any illusions concerning her innocent-looking appearance. "Faleril sent me to give you some aid. Stretch out the knife hand, spill a poor bastard's guts. But you're on the same side as the pig now?"
The barbed questions went entirely ignored by Vithsil, who just looked up at Maro and said, "your prisoner, sir."
"...right. Yes." Maro took out his cuffs, not entirely sure what had just happened. If he wasn't mistaken, Vithsil had just… defended him. From another Dark Brotherhood assassin. If Babette had succeeded in carrying out her hit—Maro wasn't totally certain he would have lost, per se, but he wouldn't have given himself favorable odds—Vithsil would have been free to vanish into the wilderness and do whatever he wanted. But instead, he'd defended his captor, essentially guaranteeing he'd remain a prisoner.
It was by no means whatsoever a rational decision to make. Maro didn't understand it at all.
But then, he wasn't complaining. Now he had two assassins in his grasp.
Vithsil backed off, as Maro moved in and took over the hold. He bound Babette's hands, then restrained her feet as well for good measure. He did not want to give her any chances to run.
She was pretty displeased by that. "Coward," she spat at Maro, voice still full of poison. "And you, Vithsil, you think you can get away with betraying the Dark Brotherhood? May the Wrath of Sithis be upon you. When death comes for you, it will be agonizing!"
"Then let it come," said Vithsil, who didn't seem fazed by the threat in the slightest.
Maro also let Babette's words slide right off him, as he picked her up easily and lashed her to one of the carriage's railings. "I should kill you," he commented, mildly, but he wasn't wholly successful in preventing a tremor of anger from bleeding into his tone.
"Then do it," Babette taunted, "or are you as pathetic as that poor excuse of an assassin next to you?"
"I'd love to. But I need to know where the remnants of your miserable little 'Family' are."
"As if I'd ever tell you." "We'll see about that."
Sleep was not a luxury Maro was going to enjoy that night. Having one assassin in his camp had already put Maro's mind on edge enough that he'd been awakening at the slightest disturbances the past few nights. Now there were two of them, and one was a vampire. Maro harboured no doubt that Babette was a major risk, even trussed up as she was.
Even if he wanted to sleep, in these conditions, he probably wouldn't manage to get any. So he gave up on the notion, and exited his tent to stand watch over Babette instead.
It seemed he wasn't the only one afflicted with an inability, or unwillingness, to sleep, because he was greeted by the sight of Vithsil standing by the back of the carriage with his hood drawn low over his face and his attention clearly focused on Babette.
He caught the briefest flash of amber irises as the kid sent a quick glance his way, just long enough to recognize him. A moment later Vithsil made a subtle—and, Maro realized, calculated—movement, in such a manner that allowed him to keep his main attention on Babette but also put Maro in his peripherals.
Maro had to admit it, that was an appreciable level of vigilance for someone who had never received any formal training on such matters. Preserving high awareness of the environment while simultaneously keeping main attention primarily on the prisoner, rapidly identifying new variables in the environment and categorizing them to determine how much attention they warranted, keeping an eye on any potential unknowns.
(It did sting a little to be counted among the potential unknowns. But then, Maro couldn't blame him—he doubted Vithsil trusted him any more than he trusted Vithsil.)
Had Vithsil picked up all that just from studying his own interactions with Maro? Because if so, the kid was assimilating things quite rapidly.
It was like that time back in the Sanctuary when they'd encountered each other for the first time, when Vithsil had copied—albeit with nontrivial flaws—Maro's montante guard apparently just from having seen it on the Commander.
It was remarkably… well, remarkably Penitus Oculatus of him.
Maro cut off that train of thought before it could go much further—before it could go to all the ways Vithsil reminded him of Gaius.
He didn't know what to think of the part of him that saw (recognized?) that if the kid had been an agent, he wouldn't have been half bad as one.
"Forget it," he finally decided, "I'm not getting any sleep with the two of you in my camp. It was hard enough with just one. Get in. We're only a few hours out from the outpost anyway."
Vithsil joined Babette in the back of the carriage, while Maro resumed his position at the reins. Not once during the entire journey back toward Dragon Bridge did the vampire assassin ever shut. up.
"So, Vithsil, tell me, what made you side with the pig, anyway?"
The lack of a response didn't deter her at all from continuing to run her mouth. "Giving me the silent treatment, are you? I guess that hasn't changed about you. Always so quiet."
"I still don't get it, though. He killed our Family members. Your Family members."
"And you killed my son," Maro finally snapped, having had quite enough of her, "so what? Now that you're on the receiving end for once, you're playing victim? Save it. Stop talking or I'll gag you."
"Ugh. Fine."
She seemed to get the message. Maro was very glad to be free of her yammering, although the thoughts rattling around in his head didn't really make for much better company nowadays.
Between the Greybeards and Ustengrav and all the business about the return of the dragons, he'd almost forgotten about the Dark Brotherhood. It seemed that fate saw fit to remind him that they continued to exist.
It was fortunate, then, that remedying that unsavory fact fit nicely into Maro's immediate future.
Yes, it was about time he hunted down the remaining assassins. Like he'd intended to do all along, before Vithsil came along and made his life so much more complicated.
Chapter 12: Tracing Black Lines
Chapter Text
Thankfully, there were no more assassination attempts, or dragon attacks, the rest of the way to Dragon Bridge. Maro hauled Babette into the outpost, followed closely by Vithsil. The building was quieter than Maro was accustomed to, in the lull of the night shift.
"Commander!" Arcturus saluted. "Is that, er… is that a child?"
"No, said Maro, "she's a vampire who looks like a child. Lock her in the cell," he ordered two other agents, pushing Babette towards them, but applied less force than he'd intended to.
Arcturus jerked his head, indicating in Vithsil's direction. "And what about him?"
"What about him?"
"We only have one holding cell," his second pointed out to him, and Maro sighed at himself. What an annoyingly basic oversight to make.
"I expected that you'd have shipped him off to Solitude already," Arcturus remarked.
"I'm sure that's what I should do. Pass him off to Ahtar and be done with it." Even as Maro voiced those words, the idea felt strangely wrong on his tongue.
"And will you?" Arcturus didn't even bother trying to hide the fact that he doubted the answer would be 'yes.'
He was probably right.
Unbidden, Maro's mind conjured up the mental image of Vithsil kneeling on the low stage at the Solitude gates, Captain Aldis's boot on his back, Ahtar standing over him with an axe in hand. It surprised him just how strongly he automatically wanted to object to the idea.
"You've become too good at reading me," said Maro.
Arcturus chuckled knowingly. "That's a no. In that case, sir, what will you do?"
Maro glanced at the boy, who was standing out of the way and trying not to look too invested in the discussion of his own fate. A possibility was presenting itself, though not one Maro was overly fond of. "Hm," he muttered, a little reluctantly. "I'm not sure I have another option besides this. You. Come."
He exited into the cold night air with Vithsil accompanying obediently, somewhat to his side, somewhat behind him, and he took the young assassin to his home on the other side of the dragon bridge. The wrought-iron gate swung as quietly as ever as Maro opened it and gestured for his… companion to enter before him.
"You're staying with me for the foreseeable future," Maro explained levelly, trying to keep the statement detached, professional, once they'd entered the house and he'd shut the door behind them.
Vithsil nodded acknowledgement, a sort of realization crossing his features, like the reason he was there was only just registering.
"I don't have a room for you. This house only has two, and Gai—the spare bedroom is off limits."
"Yes, sir. I won't need one."
"You're free to arrange your own meals. I couldn't resume cooking for two so soon, anyway."
Vithsil offered another simple affirmation. If the assassin picked up on the bitter subtext of that second sentence, he didn't comment on it.
"And one more thing."
Maro abruptly spun on his heel, rounding on his ward. The sudden change in attitude and the threatening movement caused Vithsil to startle, then quickly back away a few steps until he ran into the wall behind him. Good—Maro wanted to make a point.
"Do not touch my personal belongings."
After a beat, Vithsil nodded in a motion that was somehow simultaneously decisive and demure. "Understood, sir."
"Good," said Maro. "Do you know where the rest of your Family is?"
"No, sir. Sorry."
"That's fine," Maro replied automatically, before it registered with him just how much more difficult that would make his objective. Well. It was probably asking too much of the world for all his solutions to be packaged nicely with his conveniently cooperative captive.
"Babette might—she was closer to the inner circle. I was never really one of them."
"I don't think she'll answer my questions as willingly as you have."
He sighed, and resigned himself to the fact that he'd have to interrogate the vampire, as irritating as she was.
"Stay here. As you've seen, this house is surrounded by walls. If you step outside those walls without my permission and an escort, your status will be that of an armed and dangerous fugitive, and you will be treated accordingly."
It was as much a warning as it was a threat, and, judging by his solemn acknowledgement, Vithsil fully recognized it. The young assassin quietly settled into one of the dining room chairs, and Maro didn't need to interrogate him to read his intent.
Maro found himself satisfied his new roommate wouldn't be going anywhere. With that out of the way, the commander retired for what was left of the night.
—
Daybreak the next morning was, in a way, anticlimactic—the presence of the extra occupant in the house hardly made any difference to Maro's routine. Vithsil hadn't left the chair he'd taken the previous night, and Maro descended the stairs to see that the young assassin was sleeping on the table, head nestled in folded arms. He stirred slightly when Maro's foot landed on the bottom step, but didn't wake.
Maro, for his part, left quickly. He still had a job to do, and information to extract from a certain vampire.
He was, as usual, one of the first to arrive at the outpost for the day shift. There, he only waited briefly to accept the handoff and corresponding report from the senior agent he was relieving. And then he descended to the holding cell.
"Where are they?"
Babette stared at Maro through the bars separating her from her interrogator. She blinked, and answered with an entirely unconvincing tone of innocence, "who?"
He scowled. He really wasn't in the mood for the whole song and dance, the evasion and the mind games. "You know what I'm referring to. The rest of your Family," he didn't bother hiding the scorn in that word, "where are they?"
Babette laughed in his face, and he intently did not react to it. "I hope you didn't think I'd make it that easy for you," she taunted.
"You're hardly in a position to play coy," Maro retorted flatly. By the Divines, the more Babette spoke, the easier Maro was finding it to see past the innocent facade of her physical appearance. As much as it irritated him to listen to the arrogant little vampire, it was also refreshing, in a way. This was how interacting with the Dark Brotherhood was supposed to go. They were the enemy, to be captured, interrogated, and eliminated, not—whatever Vithsil was becoming.
"Why, will you kill me? Do you think that will make a difference? We can still serve from the Void, and you'll just be right where you started."
"Less of your kind in the world is a difference. The raid proved it. You're crippled, now."
"Oh, do you really think your raid mattered? You only cleansed the unworthy. We may be low in number, but we're stronger than ever. The Keeper will lead us back to infamy."
"I'll find the rest of you."
"Ha! You'll never find the Keeper. Even Faleril couldn't have done it if it weren't for the Keeper leaving something behind."
There it was. Slowly, Maro let a cold smile spread across his face. Watching Babette realize the mistake she'd just made was immensely satisfying.
"Thank you for your assistance," he said.
For possibly the first time since her capture, Babette had no snarky comment or taunt to throw at him. She surely recognized as well as he did, after all: he'd played her. He had what he needed.
"I'll be sure to ask Captain Aldis to prepare Castle Dour's best prison cell for you. Although I doubt you'll have very much time to appreciate it."
He didn't bother looking back as he left, and didn't see the scowl aimed at his departing back. His business there was concluded. Next on the agenda: Falkreath. Supposedly, a clue had been left behind there.
—
The blood splattering the cavern had been left to congeal and dry, and the scent of iron and death still hung in the dank air. At least Maro hadn't ordered the place burned. Incinerating his future self's eventual lead would have made for an ironic twist of fate at his expense, and Maro had been through quite enough of those.
He poked through the living quarters. Despite the rapid brutality of the raid they'd conducted weeks ago, and the fact that these rooms had been tossed during that raid, things were not as unnavigable as Maro expected. There was a surprising amount of space to maneuver around.
Though that being the case also made sense. Fighting in clutter was just asking to hit something, or debalance over an obstacle, or otherwise lose the fight and die to one misjudgement in uncooperative surroundings. His agents knew to keep the area around themselves clear enough to enable self-defense, especially in a hostile environment.
All this to say, it didn't take him nearly as long as he'd feared to find the journals. There wasn't much reading material around, in the first place, and the way the books had been thrown onto the bed suggested someone flipping through them and discarding them in turn—someone not an agent, because an agent would have mentioned it in their report. At the least, they were worth skimming, Maro decided, a decision that paid off when the second one he opened made mention of another sanctuary in Dawnstar, right there on the third page.
He did not expect to be attacked, but he was prepared for it. Complacency, he'd been reminded enough times, would get one killed in this line of work. He heard the step and the rustling of fabric first, the sound giving him a split second of warning to draw his sidearm, the dagger he wore on his belt. It was just barely enough time for him to raise the blade and parry as his assailant broke invisibility with an attack. The jester's knife rang off his as he leapt back, holding the journal still close to his chest. He wasn't about to lose such a valuable piece of evidence as that so easily.
"He knows now, he knows what he mustn't know. Can't let him sing, can't let him violate our sanctuary," the jester muttered apparently to himself, sounding more than a little crazed. "The trespasser will be silenced by the Fool of Hearts!" He nearly shrieked the last line, lunging at Maro once again.
But Maro wasn't so enamored by the jester's raving that he would do something so shortsighted as to stand and wait for the man to attack him. In the span of the fool's brief monologue, he'd traded his sidearm for his preferred primary weapon. The deadly arc of the montante's long blade forced the jester to stop in his tracks lest he be cleaved in two.
The two men stood facing each other, both tightly coiled, fully prepared for another exchange of blows. This time it was Maro who broke the tension and moved first, seizing the initiative with an advance of his own. In a tight space like this, area control was rather trivial, and the assassin couldn't easily take advantage of the greater mobility his own weapon lent him. The jester was nimble enough to keep dodging him, but he couldn't evade him forever, and Maro found himself gradually gaining ground.
He could work with this.
Maro changed his approach. The jester realized what he was doing and wasn't keen on being herded into a corner. He attempted multiple times to slip past Maro, but getting through the guard of a sword that was nearly two meters long and weighed three kilograms was by no means a trivial endeavor. At this point, Maro only needed to wait. There were only two ways this would end: either he would successfully corner the jester, or the jester would miscalculate one of his attempts to flee and give Maro the opening he needed.
The eventual result turned out to be the latter. The jester was getting frustrated, or impatient, Maro could tell. Perhaps that was why he made a movement just a little too ambitious, a little too aggressive, and Maro caught him midway. The blade connected with the jester's thigh, sending him to the ground.
The jester screeched his indignation. Maro didn't bother wasting any time—he'd already spent enough of it. A single decisive motion of the blade ended the fight.
And then there were two, Maro thought to himself. And he had an idea of where to find them. The jester attacking him here, now, was quite telling. He knows what he mustn't know. He opened the journal again, and his gaze settled on the jester's jubilant declaration of sanctuary. The entry was short, but it spoke volumes despite its length—right there on the page, written in plaintext, was the passphrase to the so-called 'joker's retreat.' It was almost too easy.
No one was around to see it, but nonetheless, Maro smiled.
It was time, it seemed, to pay a visit to Dawnstar. To see just what, exactly, the jester was trying to hide so desperately that he camped out in the husk of the Falkreath Sanctuary to protect it.
—
He made one more stop in Dragon Bridge to prepare for the upcoming outing and noticed as he entered his house that the door to Gaius's library was open.
That door was never open. Not anymore.
Immediately, Maro was on alert. An intruder must have broken in. Well, they picked the wrong damn house to burgle, and on top of that, they chose to target Gaius's library. Thieves foolish enough to target his belongings were vexing enough, but to go after the last remnants he had of his son—
He rounded the corner with his sword drawn, expecting bandits—instead he was met by the sight of Vithsil, standing by the arcane enchanter and holding a book in his hands, turning the pages carefully, almost… reverently?
What. "…the hell are you doing?"
Vithsil startled, and the movement dislodged the book from his grip. Maro's thoughts started screeching to a halt as his brain was entirely filled with the overwhelming realization that one of Gaius's books was in danger—
But hardly had he even had the time to process the situation before Vithsil did… something that was reminiscent of a spell, but it didn't look like any spell Maro had seen before.
The book froze midair, wrapped in interlocked rings and gears of bronze-silver light. Vithsil took it gently from where it floated in the air as the spell dissipated, and looked up at Maro with a wary expression.
"...reading, sir," he finally answered.
"Yes, I can see that; give me some credit," Maro said, but he kept his sword ready. "I meant," he clarified, "what are you doing in here?" The question elicited a wince, and he realized he'd let more heat into his tone than he'd intended to.
"You didn't say anything about the room and I was curious—once I saw the books I just really wanted to read them—didn't think it would do any harm—put everything back where it was before—" The onslaught of sentence fragments came rapidfire, one after another.
Maro held up a hand and Vithsil immediately stopped rambling. That last statement caught his attention.
"Did you say you 'put everything back where it was'?" Maro raised a brow. "How long have you been here, exactly?"
"I'm not sure; overnight…? I finished two books." There was a pause, and then he added, "I'm sorry."
Maro sighed, and finally sheathed his weapon. "It's just a… sensitive topic. This was Gaius's library."
He saw the moment Vithsil's eyes widened in realization. He quickly set the book down on the enchanter—exactly where Maro remembered it being, he distantly recognized—and backed away from it with his hands up. "I wasn't aware, sir—I'll leave it alone."
Gods damn the kid was hard to get a read on. He never seemed the brazen type—if anything he was one of the most timid people Maro knew—and yet he had gone wandering into this room that even Maro hadn't stepped in for ages. Maro sighed, and found that, contrary to his own expectations, he was not offended by Vithsil's breaching of the space. "You're fine," he finally said. "I should have told you. And you didn't damage anything—your respect for this place was pretty clear, even before you knew what it was."
Vithsil stayed where he was, as if petrified. Maro switched tactics.
"Good catch, by the way. How'd you do it?"
It didn't defuse the tension much. The kid hesitated, a hard-to-place expression crossing his face for a moment. But he did answer the question, looking away. "...local time-freeze."
Maro wanted to sigh again as he received the answer. Why did it have to be more time bending shenanigans? Frankly, he's had enough of that for a lifetime. Scratch that—multiple lifetimes.
The meaning of that expression on Vithsil's face clicked for him a moment later, and Maro realized what the drakelet's actual concern was. "If you meant to do harm you could have done so already; you don't need time magic shenanigans for that. I know you're not a threat."
That finally seemed to be what got Vithsil to relax—tentatively, but he relaxed nonetheless.
Maro remained still for a minute longer, considering for a moment. "…you can take over as the library's steward, if you'd like," he finally said, part of him in disbelief that he was even considering this, much less deciding it. But another part of him was saying the library would be in good hands.
Before he got an answer, he added, "you can think about it later. I need you for a mission." He tossed the journal across, and Vithsil caught it easily, his eyes lighting in recognition as he quickly skimmed the contents.
"Look familiar?"
"It belongs to Cicero."
"Belonged," Maro corrected. "This Dawnstar Sanctuary is probably where the survivors retreated to. I can follow them there now. You're coming."
"…Why me?"
"To test your allegiance." No point in not speaking plainly. Maro's endgame objective was unchanged: destroy the Dark Brotherhood. Whether Vithsil was part of that mission would depend on Vithsil.
"Understood, sir."
That was settled, then.
Maro briefly debated taking a team of agents with him as well. But in the midst of Skyrim's civil war, Dawnstar was controlled by the Stormcloak rebels at the moment, and bringing an outfit of Imperial agents to the city probably wasn't wise. No, the political situation necessitated subtlety.
Just the two of them, then.
On foot they continued, following the Karth downriver until it took them to the docks of Solitude. There Maro commissioned a sloop to sail the rest of the way to Dawnstar.
They set sail, and the vessel slipped quietly down the river's currents into the Sea of Ghosts. The frigid air, the scent of brine, the sea spray kicked up from the bow—the ocean seemed to envelope Maro. It wasn't as though the act of sailing was foreign to him; anyone native to the Imperial City was practically fated to become familiar with it, what with how prominent travel by water is in the city. But suddenly the memory came rushing into his head, a memory of sinking, of blood dispersing into blue, of frigid water all around him and turning his joints stiff and pulling him down to the seafloor and flooding into his throat and his lungs—
Maro gasped reflexively and took several steps back from the bow, an involuntary shiver running down his spine.
"Sir?"
"It's—nothing. Just a particularly negative memory." Of a death not from this timeline, but it wasn't like he could just say that. Unfortunately the fact that it technically hadn't actually happened didn't fade Maro's memory of it in the slightest.
"Are you alright?"
"I'll be fine," Maro said automatically, and looked back at the shore. The wind was filling the sloop's sails, and Solitude was already growing smaller over the horizon.
Yes. He'd destroy the last of the Dark Brotherhood, and finish this once and for all.
Then, he'd be fine.
—
"You always hear about closure, you know? And you never really know what that means."
Mr. Corbett, Criminal Minds
Chapter 13: Thinking Of You
Chapter Text
Afternoon was fading into evening as the sloop pulled quietly into the small harbor cutting through the center of Dawnstar. The trailing days of Hearthfire weren't quite late enough in the season for the ice to turn the northeastern shores of Skyrim unnavigable from ice, but the first inches of those frozen sheets were already creeping out from the edges of the land. Maro tried not to look too relieved as he stepped onto the pier and tied their vessel down. He could feel tension leaving his shoulders.
And if he had been adhering to the center of the boat from the moment they entered the Sea of Ghosts to the moment they docked, neither of them mentioned it.
Immediately, Maro set out to canvas for information. He already had a clear destination in mind. There was no other place that bounced rumors around quite as effectively as an inn, though, he wasn't sure how frostily the patrons here would receive an Imperial.
His suspicions were confirmed when the atmosphere in the inn chilled just moments after Maro stepped through the doors. Despite his wearing a plainclothes disguise, it seemed, the locals could still tell he was from Cyrodiil, and distrusted him for it. It was probably a fortuitous decision to come here ostensibly as an ordinary traveller rather than an agent of the Empire. He wasn't keen on being attacked on sight and getting caught in a brawl.
Maro ignored the distinct coldness being directed at him by the other patrons and slid into one of the barstools. He nodded in greeting as the innkeeper came over, and commented, "not the most welcoming atmosphere."
"Sorry," said the innkeeper, "you've come at a bad time, is all. Most people here don't fancy Imperials on a good day, and the strange nightmares plaguing the town have everyone's tempers short." He held a hand out to Maro. "I'm Thoring. Proprietor of the Windpeak Inn."
Maro accepted the handshake. At least he had one lead that wasn't dead on arrival. "You don't seem too bothered by my presence," he pointed out.
Thoring chuckled, but the unmistakable spectre of grief crossed his eyes. "Life's too short to spend it squabbling politics. But that's enough about me. Can I get you a drink, or a room, perhaps? Don't worry—the nightmares don't seem to affect travellers."
Maro slid a few septims across the counter, requesting a room for two then asking, "I'm looking for information: regarding a strange door that might be around here. Black, a carved skull on its surface, marked with a handprint."
Thoring hastily swept the coins into a coinbag as he nodded. "Sure," he replied, a little uneasily, "everyone in town knows about it. And not to go near it."
"I see." Maro nodded, agreeing without agreeing. "Sounds like the location is fairly well-known. Would you mind letting me know where it is?"
"You're not looking to mess with it, are you? Well. It's not my funeral. Head up the harbor's east shoreline. Keep following it and you'll find the door."
"Thank you."
So the intel from those journals was good after all. And it had been surprisingly easy to narrow in on the second Sanctuary's location. Maro tried not to feel relief too prematurely—there was still the actual battle ahead.
"Of course," said Thoring. "Anything else I can get you?"
"A room for two, for the night." Maro counted out the payment, passing it across the counter.
"For you and your son? Certainly," said Thoring as he handed a key to Maro. "Take the room to the south."
It took all of Maro's decades of experience training out and suppressing any involuntary tells for him to decidedly not react. It wasn't an unreasonable assumption to make, that he and Vithsil were a father-son pair, he reminded himself, and there was no way for Thoring to know. It probably wouldn't make for a half-bad cover story, actually, if he could bring himself to use it.
Maro did not confirm or deny the fact, only thanking Thoring with a surface level smile and excusing himself from the conversation.
That one innocent remark kept him awake that night far longer than he'd care to admit, and was far more haunting than any nightmare the town's bad dreams plague could ever have thrown at him.
—
Maro—at his travelling companion's insistence—ended up going through a brief interlude involving a coma-inducing miasma, a memory-eating skull, and a former priest of Vaermina now turned priest of Mara, in a short but rather surreal sequence that ended in the nightmare curse being lifted. Given the politics of the place, he doubted they'd see much gratitude for it, except maybe from Thoring. And Erandur, the priest who took them through their quest.
Between Klimmek's supplies and now this, Maro was starting to wonder. The random acts of charity certainly did say something about the kid. Something he was perhaps becoming more receptive towards listening to.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that. The two of them were, after all, supposed to be adversaries. A murderer and an agent of the law. A prisoner and his jailer.
Was that really all they were, now?
That was what this mission was for, Maro reminded himself. To determine where, exactly, the drakelet's loyalties were.
Well. He'd have the answer to that in short order, because the duo had arrived at the location of their quarry.
The Black Door sat nestled in the cliffs of the northern coast, much closer to the city than Maro expected. It probably would have been visible from the water, had Maro sailed further on instead of turning into Dawnstar's harbor. It whispered to him in a familiar tone, one he'd already heard in the forests of Falkreath many times now. Beside him, Vithsil went still and alert.
"What is life's greatest illusion?"
There the question was, exactly as written in the jester's notebook. Maro flipped it open to the page in question, where the passphrase sat plain as day. "Innocence, my brother," he recited.
"Welcome home."
And now here he was, approaching the final act of this story once more, this story he still had yet to see the ending of. Would this time be different?
There was nothing to do but continue, and see.
This is for you, Gaius.
He eased the door open as quietly as he could, and gestured for Vithsil to precede him into the underground tunnel beyond as he drew his weapon.
The two of them crept down narrow staircases that took them to a sort of elevated area, overlooking a larger room. Vithsil froze, and laid a hand on Maro's sleeve in a signal for the Commander to do the same. The soft sound of silverware tapping against crockery filtered up from below, where evidently one of the assassins was located.
No, correction, two. Maro could make out two voices in a conversation now, floating through the air: one with a distinct elvish accent, the other low and gravelly.
"That jester hasn't returned in days," said the gravelly voice. "Think his mind finally shattered, and he ran off?"
"Watch yourself," the elvish voice snapped. "It is not your place to question the Keeper."
"First Babette goes missing, and now Cicero," the gravelly voice replied, without missing a beat, apparently unmoved by the aggression. "Something's up."
The elvish voice hummed.
"Aren't you concerned at all? There's just the two of us now. The Brotherhood—"
"The Brotherhood will endure," said the elvish voice, sounding slightly annoyed. "I will make sure of it. I already have an alternative plan for getting rid of that bothersome Commander and assassinating the Emperor."
Maro bristled.
"Babette said the same thing, and she hasn't returned in over a week," said the gravelly voice. "As far as you know, that 'bothersome Commander' got his hands on her too, on top of already having the snake."
"That is not my concern."
"If you have a plan why didn't you share it with us? Isn't that the point of a leader? Do you actually care about leading the Brotherhood, or is this just a means for you to fulfill your own—"
"I will hear no more of this insolence," the elvish voice cut his conversation partner off. Another sound floated up of utensils clacking smartly against the plate they were set down against, followed by soft padding footsteps that faded to the right.
"Faleril," the gravelly voice called, but received no reply. "…damn it," he muttered to empty air.
Maro took that as their cue to make their own entrance. If he blitzed the remaining assassin in the room, he could possibly take the kill without alerting the one with the elvish voice, and then pick that one off afterwards. It was less risky than engaging both at once.
Through the metal bars that composed the 'wall' at the edge of the upper floor, Maro could see down into the dining area where the two assassins had been. At the table was a Redguard in ragged burgundy cloth, who must have been the speaker with the gravelly voice—Nazir, as he recalled. His back was turned to Maro's direction, which was very fortunate for Maro and very unfortunate for the assassin.
Set in the wall at the right of the dining room was another door beyond which Maro could only make out a long hallway. No doubt that was the direction the second assassin with the elvish voice had left the room.
Then the plan of attack was simple. Maro waved down Vithsil's attention, and signalled the strategy: jump from the top of the stairs and blitz the Redguard, then storm the right hallway to eliminate the elf. One of the more straightforward mission briefings he's given as of late, though doing it silently took a little creativity.
Fortunately it seemed like he successfully conveyed his intent when Vithsil offered a single nod.
As the two of them took position, Nazir glanced behind himself up the stairs, apparently having heard or sensed something that tipped him off. It was too late to change the plan, though; Maro had already fully committed to the offensive.
Regardless, this wasn't a severe setback. He just needed to finish the fight quickly enough that his quarry didn't get the chance to alert the other assassin.
With the element of surprise on his side, Maro transitioned from his landing into a swift kick that knocked the breath out of Nazir before he could yell out. No sooner had recognition sparked in his opponent's eyes than he followed through, bringing his blade to bear. The Redguard hurriedly drew his own scimitar to parry, but not fast enough; Maro's sword was deflected off course, but not fully blocked. As it was, the flat of the montante, carried by momentum, ended up striking the side of Nazir's head with a dull clang. The force of three kilograms of moving steel colliding with his skull was enough to send the assassin reeling, staggering backward, right into Vithsil's low sweep that kicked his legs out from under him. Vithsil snagged the scimitar when impact with the ground loosened Nazir's grip on it. He darted out of the way as Maro moved in, raising his own sword, its point hovering threateningly low over his enemy's exposed throat.
"Oh, how eager you are. Why don't you slow down for a moment, good Commander," a voice with an elvish accent purred behind Maro, stopping him just shy of cleaving the head off the Redguard he had on the ground. In the edge of his vision he could see a High Elf slowly entering his field of vision, dragging with him a familiar drakelet.
No doubt this was Faleril. The last of the assassins, the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, who was now holding a knife to Vithsil's throat and trying to make this into a hostage situation. A satisfied grin fell over his face as he made his ultimatum: "You are going to drop that sword of yours, turn around, and walk away. Or the snake gets a new breathing hole."
Maro wasn't so naive as to actually believe a word of that. He full well knew the Listener had no intention of ending this conflict peacefully. Quite the contrary.
Besides, Maro wasn't here to negotiate peace, either. The Argonian with the violet eyes has been the one to carry out the act, but here was the leader, the man responsible for it all, the man who gave that order that shattered Maro's world.
"I think we both know you won't let me walk away. No, this fight between me and the lot of you was always going to end here, one way or another," he answered, and narrowed his eyes. "And I intend to end it my way."
"What a shame. I'll give you one more chance to reconsider. Give it some thought, hmm?" Faleril suggested smoothly, like he held all the cards in this encounter. "I'd hate for you to lose your replacement son the same way you lost the original."
Maro jerked back. He felt his grip tighten on his weapon as those words echoed around in his ears loud as a thunderclap. A cold, frozen sort of fury rose over him, the kind that brought with it a sharp, crystalline tone, the kind that seemed to slow the entire world around it.
How dare he bring Gaius into this.
It wouldn't be enough to just kill the Listener. Maro was going to make this pathetic elf scream.
"That," he said, syllables coming out sharp and clipped and with enough danger to make even the Listener flinch, "was a mistake."
Maro let his blade drop into the vulnerable flesh of Nazir's throat. There was no ceremony, no spectacle or gloating, just a single simple movement that cleaved a gaping line through a windpipe.
The quiet gurgles of the Redguard's death throes were the only sound to break the ensuing silence that fell over the room. The Listener didn't know what to say. Maro had nothing left to say.
"You'll—you'll regret that," Faleril finally managed to sputter, and Maro could see the way his knife hand's grip tightened around the handle of the weapon.
Maro wasn't concerned. He knew what Vithsil was capable of. Faleril was, apparently, lacking that critical information, though, or he wouldn't have tried pulling off this ill-conceived plan of his.
Maro, too, had once tried to hold the drakelet captive. And while he didn't realize at the time, and as much as it stung his pride to admit it, the only reason he'd succeeded was because his prisoner was fully prepared to offer him an unconditional surrender. Something very much not the case for the Listener.
Vithsil whispered something, and then faded, leaving Faleril's arms wrapped impotently around nothing.
"You should've just come at me," Maro informed the last free remnant of the Dark Brotherhood in a voice entirely free of inflection, as the Listener furiously slashed empty air. "It probably would have gone better for you."
Faleril looked ready to take Maro up on that offer, a sentiment the Commander was more than glad to oblige. But he'd never get a chance. Between one moment and the next, Vithsil was behind the Listener, and Shouted, the force in his breath blowing Faleril off balance—and right into Maro's range. And if that wasn't a demonstration of allegiance, Maro didn't know what was.
He raised his sword to intercept, and the blade connected with the Listener's knife hand, relieving the assassin of both weapon and fingers.
Faleril collapsed to his knees howling in pain. Maro advanced and kicked him in the ribs, sending him sprawling backward. Blood flew through the air. The sound of Faleril's panting gasps filled the room as Maro took another step forward, feeling nothing but ice in his veins.
Despite the situation he was in, Faleril still apparently felt the need to throw self-preservation to the wind. "Don't you think this is a little pathetic?" he managed through the pain, rolling his eyes slightly. "Getting so worked up over Gaius you caught yourself a new child to replace him? Really, it was just business."
"Keep his name out of your mouth," Maro ordered as those cold crystals of anger stabbed deeper, and punctuated his statement by stabbing his sword into the Listener's knee.
Faleril cried out again and a shiver of gratification ran through Maro at the sound. But a light hand landed softly on his sword arm before he could stab the elf in the other leg.
Maro snapped his gaze to Vithsil, and felt another current of ice in his chest that had him subtly preparing to respond to another attack. His voice was low when he spoke. "What are you doing?"
Vithsil's hand trembled slightly on Maro's arm, but he met the Commander's eyes steadily. "There is no joy to be found in this."
And the world seemed to soften around him in an instant, losing that harsh crystalline sharpness that had been coloring its edges, and Maro became suddenly aware of a feeling of grounding. This wasn't just a last ditch attempt by an assassin to protect his leader. The kid was right; Maro wasn't here to torture his defeated enemies. It was unbecoming of someone of his position and he did have enough self-respect left to hold himself to that standard of professionalism.
Just kill the Listener and move on, he told himself. He ignored the way Faleril tainted him for losing his nerve and took the Altmer's head with one clean motion.
And like that, it was over. The Dark Brotherhood flickered out and trickled away quietly into history like the blood still spreading slowly across the floor. The two of them who brought it down stood alone together, the Penitus Oculatus commander and the Dragonborn, the protégé and the progeny of the Dragon God of Time.
As the atmosphere settled once more, Maro finally turned to Vithsil and opened his mouth to say something—and in that moment, among the silent walls, Maro felt suddenly, inexplicably small. It was a similar feeling to one that had settled over him in a dream a long time ago about darkness and hourglasses and scaled wings. Distantly, he heard Vithsil breathe out, "Bormahu," as he felt the eye of something much greater settle on him.
He was seen.
He could almost feel the weight of the Divine's gaze, just for a moment, and the air almost seemed to be sitting heavier against his skin. Something about this particular moment in time had Akatosh's attention, and a brief current of nervousness ran through Maro when he made that realization. All this time, and he still didn't know what the Divine had ever wanted of him, in the first place. And if he made the wrong decision, diverted the world down the wrong timeline—
Maro didn't want to reset again.
But he didn't know how to avoid it.
How was he meant to satisfy a god?
"He doesn't expect you to be anyone but yourself," the soft voice of his travelling companion came, interrupting his spiralling thoughts. A full-body twitch ran up Maro's spine in a motion that wasn't quite a startle. In the presence of Akatosh he'd almost forgotten about Vithsil.
"I hope you're right," he managed to say through the heavy air, and Maro decided then to believe, and to allow himself to hope, one more time.
If Vithsil was right, there was no reason for Maro to do anything more than carry on as he would have as if he wasn't being watched by a god. That sounded far easier in his head than it actually was. But, well, for starters:
"I think we're done here, then, but you tell me. As far as you know, did we miss anyone?"
Vithsil looked like he was expecting a trap somewhere in that question. Maro sighed. "Besides you."
"I don't believe so, sir."
"That's a relief. Let's return to Dragon Bridge, then." Maro sheathed his weapon, a part of him expecting to be overtaken by that dreaded sense of vertigo at any moment as the timeline reset again, but it didn't happen. Time went on.
It was as the sloop hit the waves of the Sea of Ghosts that the weight of Akatosh's gaze slowly lifted at last, and this time, it left a sense of finality in its wake.
The loop didn't reset.
—
His return to the outpost in Dragon Bridge caught the attention of everyone in the building, like they already knew this was something major. Maro could feel the expectation hanging in the air, every agent under his command itching to know the outcome of his mission. He looked around the room and took a breath.
"It's done," he said. "The Dark Brotherhood has been eliminated."
Chapter 14: Happy Anniversary
Chapter Text
Despite its relative understatedness, the applause felt overwhelming, washing over Vithsil like a tidal wave, putting him strangely on edge. Next to him, the Commander didn't seem to be paying him all that much mind, and didn't outwardly react when he took one step to the side. He interpreted that as meaning he was safe to stray a little, and took the opportunity to slip away quietly into the near corner of the room out of everyone's way and watch. He saw the agents congratulating their leader, saw the Captain who served as the outpost second-in-command observing his superior discreetly but carefully, didn't intrude upon any of it because their celebration was not for him.
And it was a celebration, even though the agents of the Penitus Oculatus were entirely too professional to make anything resembling a party out of it; it was still perceivable, the way the mood in the room was as a whole uplifted. It made for a pleasant contrast against the uncertainty that had permeated the place last time, when Maro had left for Dawnstar to eliminate the last remnants of the Dark Brotherhood with only a captured assassin from the very same organization at his side.
The fact that Vithsil was not only still breathing, but also standing under his own power unbound and unconfined, was probably a good sign that he had in fact demonstrated his allegiance to a sufficient degree for the Commander. It had seemed a very near thing at the end, when he'd stepped into danger to keep the Commander from violating his own code and standards of conduct, and Maro had fixed him with that incredibly flat stare like he suspected Vithsil was finally betraying him, and Vithsil thought he was about to be killed over misunderstood intent, and even Father Akatosh's attention had been attracted to that moment in their little lives. But in the end Maro had stood down, and Vithsil was still in one piece, and was still being given more liberty than he expected and probably deserved.
Although that was possibly about to change, part of his brain pointed out, because he'd caught the way Maro had summoned Arcturus and then flicked his eyes around the room until they found Vithsil. He tamped sudden nervousness as the Commander made to approach him.
"Commander," Vithsil greeted respectfully, straightening to attention, once Maro had reached approximately a conversational speaking distance.
"At ease. I have a proposition for you," Maro said, and Vithsil could pick up on a sort of uncertainty the Commander was trying not to show. This might have been concerning, but he didn't get time to let his thoughts run away with possibilities before Maro voiced the actual proposition. "I'd like to extend to you an offer to join the Penitus Oculatus."
That—was not what Vithsil had expected to hear, and he replayed the previous moment in his memory to ensure he hadn't just imagined it or something—no, it was a real moment in time that had just occurred.
Unexpected was one word for it. For a moment Vithsil didn't quite know how to respond to that, because of all the possible outcomes that could have come out of the unorthodox little adventure that was the prior month, this was not one he anticipated—at best he figured he'd go back to looking at the inside of a cell again.
"I—if you'll have me, sir." It was still hard to believe, that Maro would want to recruit him, who had until recently been an assassin for the organization Maro's was bent on destroying.
"I wouldn't have offered otherwise," Maro replied, and Vithsil could tell he was serious.
"It… it would be an honor," he answered, and there was conviction in those words, because this was an offer he really had no business refusing even if the alternative wasn't prison, or death. Haunting memories lurked in the back of his mind, of bright and golden timelines, snapping and dissolving into nothing, severed away by a single movement of his own blade—
This was a chance for him to make a difference for the better in this world. Instead of… what he'd been in the business of before. It was more than he deserved, and so it was the least he could do to make the most of it.
He glanced up again and was surprised to see what looked like faint hints of approval in Maro's expression. But it seemed he wasn't about to receive any elaboration—at least, not now, because the only instruction he received was, "come to my office after the end of shift."
"Not bad," Arcturus commented before taking his own leave, "I think he likes you."
Vithsil watched the (his?) Commander's retreating figure, and wondered.
—
Maro had no idea why he'd just done what he'd just done. He sat in the solitude of his office, going over his own decision in his head again. It was impulsive, but still, somehow, it felt like the right way to go about it. The question of what to do with Vithsil had been an open one ever since the day of his capture, one Maro had admittedly been somewhat avoiding thinking about until all of ten minutes ago.
He did think the kid had the kind of potential that could make for an agent of successful calibre. The skillset was certainly there, on top of that Dragonborn power that itself was already impressive enough on its own merit. And as for character…
If Maro had been told on the day of the raid that he would spare the life of an assassin to whom he'd later personally extend an offer to join the Penitus Oculatus, he might have thought it was some bizarre prank. Yet that was exactly the reality he found himself in now, and he found that he didn't even really object to it. His memory cast back to Vithsil acquiescing under Maro's blade, Vithsil mourning his own victims on the side of that mountain, Vithsil Shouting down the Listener in the Dawnstar Sanctuary. Klimmek's supply shipment in Ivarstead, the nightmare curse in Dawnstar. Maro never thought he'd say this about anyone affiliated with a cult of murderous assassins, but the kid did have a good heart behind his great power.
Not that the Penitus Oculatus was an organization Maro would characterize wholly as 'good.' But he liked to think he and his own agents tried to stay on the fair side in their actions, on average at least in the grand scheme of things.
The point was, if Vithsil channeled that earnestness into a cause, the kid would make for a formidable force behind it, for better or for worse. Inducting him as an agent could facilitate Maro's desire to limit that to just the 'for better' part.
Distantly, he was struck with the realization that he was considering something almost like guiding the kid. With that came a dangerous question, lingering at the edges of his mind; it had been there for a while now in some form or another, but now it was suddenly harder to ignore.
Was he ready to have a protégé?
Or would that hit too close to home?
But in what felt like no time at all, it was too late to go back on the offer—the door to his office swung open quietly on its hinges as the outpost's resident potentially-reformed former assassin stepped tentatively into the room.
"Come in," said Maro, chasing off his second thoughts and forcing himself to appear less turmoiled than he actually felt.
Vithsil fully entered the room then, shutting the door softly behind himself. Maro stood and moved around his desk to join the kid.
"Vithsil of…"
He paused, a moment of consideration, before deciding,
"Vithsil of Dragon Bridge."
The kid looked mildly surprised, but said nothing to interrupt.
"You are about to take on a purpose very different from the one placed upon you by what you were before," he stated, falling into the formal cadence that came with reciting something for a legal record. "Are you willing to commit yourself to this path in full?"
It was the kind of thing that made it not very difficult for the participant to know what to say in the gaps. Vithsil nodded once firmly, resolution sparking in his bright eyes. "I am, sir."
"Alright, raise your right hand," Maro directed, and waited a beat. Vithsil stood before him with a solemnity that sharply contrasted his usual timid demeanor and followed the instruction.
The sight of that one simple movement hit Maro with a small surge of recollection. A memory, his memory of the last time he'd presided over this ceremony, of the last time he'd accepted a new agent's oaths of service. It wasn't just a swearing-in ceremony, though, was it? That one was unique, uniquely important.
Despite all the years that had passed, he still remembered that day like it was yesterday, him standing in that same spot in his office, his son across from him where Vithsil stood now, the completion of the call-and-response dialogue between them that would make Agent Gaius Maro. Anticipation, joy, love. A father's pride. The future had seemed so golden then.
Once, it was a memory Maro would have fondly recalled, back when that memory was still beautiful.
Now it was only bitter.
Maro took a steadying breath and tried to ignore the way a fathomless pain stabbed in his heart. Now was a very inconvenient time for his grief to surge, and if he wasn't careful, it would drown him—he couldn't let it drown him. It was just a few lines, and being as highly ranked as he was, he'd have to do this again in the future. He couldn't just fall apart any time a recruit earned their first rank from now on.
He tried to focus on the here and the now, and opened his mouth to recite the first line of the oaths of service.
But he could only see Gaius standing before him in that flawless new Penitus Oculatus uniform, meeting his eyes with a little bit of pride, a little bit of embarrassment, a little bit of sheepishness. His breath caught in his throat. He couldn't—he couldn't bring himself to say the words. He couldn't bring himself to say anything.
"Sir?" Vithsil said, sounding concerned.
Sir? Gaius echoed, sounding concerned.
Maro blinked hard, several times. Screwed his eyes shut, and reopened them. It did nothing to change what he was seeing. The ghost of his son still stood in Vithsil's place, waiting expectantly.
He felt like he was swaying. Perhaps he was.
"I'm sorry," he managed to say, his voice sounding husky, strained, to his own ears. "I can't—do this right now. Ask Captain Arcturus to see to your oaths; he is authorized to administer—"
You are authorized to speak with my voice, and administer with my hand. The words thundered in his ears, some of the last words he'd ever given to his son. Despite having only ever recorded them in ink, he could hear them in his own voice as clear as anything he'd ever said aloud, and they stabbed at his heart more sharply than any weapon could.
Maro turned away abruptly with a harsh shake of his head. In the edges of his peripheral vision, he saw Gaius—he saw Vithsil reach one hand out toward him.
"I need to leave," he might have mumbled as he left the office, the words sounding distant and indistinct. He wasn't sure at that point whether he'd even spoken them aloud or if he just thought he did. He wasn't sure of much at all.
The world around him somehow felt simultaneously too close and far away. Disjointed. Here was a world free of the Dark Brotherhood, an achievement made by Maro's hand, and wasn't he supposed to feel… proud? Uplifted? Something other than hollow?
He retreated to his home, taking some form of shelter behind the high walls that surrounded it, and locked the gate behind him because he knew his fellow agents well and certainly knew Arcturus would come looking for him the moment Vithsil told the Captain that Maro had left in such a disordered state. And right now Maro needed… not that. He needed to be undisturbed—he needed to be in his garden, alone.
Alone save for his son buried beneath his feet. His Gaius, once so bright a source of light in his life, now forever taken from him. Who only in death would he ever see again.
He could feel the hot trails of tears running down his face, falling away like all the dreams he and his son had once shared of their futures.
The Dark Brotherhood assassins had been eradicated, but it gave Maro no comfort. Perhaps it never would have. It wasn't like it would have given Gaius back to him. Only dying would give that to Maro, but it seemed like the Divines, for whatever incomprehensible reason, weren't even letting him have that.
Except—
The loop hadn't reset.
The previous turn, Maro hadn't died, but the loop had reset anyway after the raid on the Falkreath sanctuary ended with the deaths of every Dark Brotherhood assassin, for reasons that still eluded Maro. The only thing he'd really been able to conclude was that whatever Akatosh wanted of him, the destruction of the Dark Brotherhood somehow didn't fit into that plan.
Except, Maro realized, here he stood in a world where once again, not a single Dark Brotherhood assassin was left in Skyrim. And yet instead of reverting, time continued to flow onward around him.
For what reason, Maro still didn't know. He'd accepted by now that the logic of the loops was something beyond him. But now, perhaps he was finally free of them.
And perhaps it didn't matter. He had an outcome he was at least mostly satisfied with. The Dark Brotherhood was gone. The Emperor was safe. The assassins hadn't even managed to kill any of the later targets from the first turn—somewhere out there, Vittoria Vici was a happy newlywed alive and well, the Gourmet could continue his illustrious but anonymous career as one of Tamriel's greatest cooks, Morthal's inn patrons would continue to suffer the 'talents' of their bard—even that insufferable decoy the Emperor had employed would leave the tower unharmed after the end of the dinner. All of those original victims were saved,
except for Gaius.
Like an immutable constant across every loop, Gaius was still gone.
It was one month ago to the day now.
This was the good ending, he supposed, the ending where the Penitus Oculatus prevailed, where he prevailed, accomplishing his mission and protecting the Emperor. For a good ending, it felt incredibly bitter.
Because he still stood at the foot of his son's grave. And here was the corruption, the line out of place, the black stain on the last page. Here was the aching absence, the jagged gap eating at Maro' world, the hole sucking at any light or joy it found. Here was the universe reminding him again that it is not kind, that victory does not exist here, that there is no such thing as happily ever after.
One month to the day, and all he was left with was this grotesque anniversary.
Before today, Maro at least had revenge to cling onto, a mission to focus on and occupy his mind. Now that was gone too, leaving nothing but the gaping void that had formed when his son was ripped away from him. With his vengeance the burning rage had faded, left bereft of a target. But its departure only unmasked an empty absence that burned in its desolation, a pain that stabbed far deeper than the depths of his anger ever reached. It was almost a suffocating sensation. Like the emptiness in his heart was spreading, all-consuming, all around him. An inescapable fog of despair. It didn't matter how many of his mistakes he corrected, because in the end this would still be the world he had to live in, because he couldn't correct the mistake that mattered most of all. That one, he could only relive. Again, and again, and again.
But this was, perhaps, the last loop. The evidence certainly seemed to indicate that, at least.
For the first time in a long time, Maro felt something a little like hope. It was a twisted thing, too dark to really be called by that name, too heavy for such a buoyant emotion. After all, what he was 'hoping' for at that moment was a final, permanent death.
If he truly was released from the loop—
He unsheathed the dagger he wore as a sidearm. The edge of the blade shone almost alluringly in the dim moonlight.
Maro had decades of experience in both open combat and covert eliminations under his belt. He knew exactly where to aim for killing blows.
He knew exactly where to place the dagger to send it through his heart.
His thoughts continued to linger on his son as golden light filled his vision.
I'm coming, Gaius.
I'll be home soon.
—
"To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task."
Julian Gough, End Poem
Thrēnus Ad Sōla Arbor
Act 2: The Apple
Fīnis.
ScribblingBlue on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Nov 2024 07:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
lightofskyfire on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Nov 2024 09:18PM UTC
Last Edited Thu 28 Nov 2024 09:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
ScribblingBlue on Chapter 3 Sat 30 Nov 2024 09:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
ScribblingBlue on Chapter 6 Fri 10 Jan 2025 08:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
lightofskyfire on Chapter 6 Fri 10 Jan 2025 11:11PM UTC
Comment Actions
daysbreaking on Chapter 10 Mon 24 Feb 2025 01:19AM UTC
Comment Actions