Chapter XVIII

Ping
Ping

Ping-ping --- ping

The echoes ended with a soft thunk, and Yahad hefted a larger stone in her small palm. She crouched on the edge of the crevice, peering down into the jagged depths that cleaved the black stone of the smooth mountaintop like a ragged, bloody gash in marble flesh. Its sides were glassy, obsidian, multifaceted and sharp as blades. The bottom was lost in gloom.

Yahad tossed the larger fragment of obsidian into the depths, and this time it was clatters and bangs that answered. She straightened up, brushing off her hands. Her slim, armored figure was silhouetted darkly against the grey morning sky.

“Deep,” she commented. “I’ve never been down there, but I’d say it’s deep.”

“It is,” agreed Derch. “I went once. It is deep, and dark. But you need not fear the blackness, chandler. If you are truly of the Zainab, you will see through the eyes of the ancestors.”

The four stood in apprehensive silence around the abyss. Swirling blasts of sharp wind whirled off Red Mountain’s slopes behind them and howled their high, mournful song with the mountain as their instrument. At that height, looking down on the smooth lines of the foyada far below from the apex of the mountain at its southern terminus, the winds were of such strength that the air was nearly as palpable as water; they leaned back into its chilling embrace. The ancient wooden ladder jutting up from the crevice rattled every so often against the stone, jostled by particularly strong gusts.

After a long, grim study, Maissel stepped forward.

“The time is now, I suppose,” he grated as he knelt down at the edge. “You will see me or you will not. Wait as long as you wilt; I can find my path back to camp on my own, if I emerge after you have gone.” His boots clattered on the ladder’s top rung.

A sudden pressure on his shoulder stopped him, and he looked up. Derch towered over him, massive and black against the pale sky. His stocky fingers grasped the chandler’s shoulder.

“Hold a moment,” he growled. His hands went to his belt. “Take these, fat-smith. You may have need of a weapon.” He thrust two sheathed chitin daggers into Maissel’s broad hand.

The chandler stared in surprise. Then he grinned, and tucked the knives into his belt. “You are a good mer,” he grated. “You are all good mer.”

“We will see you before the Ashkhan, Maissel,” said Yahad firmly. “Good luck.”

“Good luck, indeed,” echoed Kanly. Derch just nodded down to him, grave and silent. Maissel smiled up at them one last time, the deep grooves of his cheeks bending around his wide lips. Then he placed his rough palms on the stone, and lowered himself into the Howling Door.

The descent was long, but not so long as Maissel would have thought from the top; he was perhaps fifteen minutes on the ancient rickety ladder with its pegs and thousand scars of booted passage, the uneven obsidian wall approaching and receding as he climbed. When he reached the cleft’s narrow base, which had been paved with platform-smooth stones wedged tight between its walls, the entrance was only a narrow strip of blue in a vast blackness. The place resounded with the winds above, moaning and wailing in unearthly agony. The cleft sloped downward from the ladder, into darkness impenetrable. This was only the vestibule; the true tomb lay beyond. He took one last breath of fresh, cold air, and entered the wraithways.

He trailed his hands along both walls of the passage at first, as the light of the entrance faded and palpable blackness took its place. He walked slowly, wary of missing a step and breaking a leg or ankle – he would die alone among ancestors who would not recognize him, if that happened. The air grew heavy with must and minerals as he went on, and warmed, surprisingly, to a chill that was only slight. But little by little he grew ware of a light in the blackness, a pale and sickly green that emanated from everywhere and nowhere, suffusing the air. Something tickled in his thoughts; a whisper, an uncaught phrase. Just the echoes of the Howling Door, he thought.

Then he saw the first corpse. Gaps had been opening in the walls to either side for some time, narrow splits gouged deep into the rock. But here – here a body had been wedged into the split, a grey bandaged body with emaciated limbs folded up against its ribs like sticks, set upright in the cleft, facing the passage. Its cloth wrapped head hung precariously immobile, a long necklace of jagged scraps of green volcanic glass around its bony neck. A womer. It had been a womer, once. It – she might have been his great-great-grandmother. He stared in horrified fascination for a long time in that scant greenish light. His ancestor. His ancestor.

There were many more, after that point; seated on shields or shalk shells wedged into the cracks, stacked one atop another, prone or in interlocked crouch, their featureless grey faces peering down from platforms above or up from between the flat stones of the constructed walkway below. Many clasped weapons or armor in their bony arms; chitin spears, swords, and axes; bows, and quivers of ancient arrows. Others bore jewelry, like the first; fantastic amulets of scavenged glass, ebony, and gemstones, gold arm bands and silver rings set with sapphires. But mostly, the mummies clutched each other; here was a pair seated arm in arm, heads on each other’s shoulders, fingers laced; there one grey body embraced another from behind, with arms and legs; here a figure huddled over an infant’s tiny, curled form; there three leaned, back to back, each grasping the wrists of the other two.

There were so many. He could not believe their numbers. Everywhere emaciated bodies, preserved corpses, his lost ancestors. The passage fractured further as he went on, splintering off into smaller side passages warded by corpses on ledges to either side, holding spears crossed above his head. But Maissel followed the central path; something told him that that was his way. For as he walked, in silent awe, the whispers he had attributed before to the Howling Door grew in his mind, murmuring, breathing, insinuating, a constant susurrating stream composed of so many voices that no one was intelligible; the ancestors, in their spirit forum.

The passage opened suddenly onto a vast natural cavern, older and more intact than the clefts he left. The stone of the floor was smooth and flat, but sloped gently downward. The ceiling vanished into the gloom near the entrance, but tilted sharply to meet the floor at the end opposite Maissel. And everywhere there were corpses, stacked in precarious pyramids and arranged or propped up on stone platforms, lined along the walls and the slanting slabs of black rock on the edges of the room. Their voices were strong.

He crossed this main chamber, heart filled with reverence and a cold dread, an unreasoning sense of trespass, of having profaned. His ancestors surrounded him, watched their encircling galleries beneath the earth, whispered in constant forum to each other in his mind, and he feared. His skin was clammy with cold sweat. He understood what Shabael had meant. They were his ancestors… but they were strange, and distant, and no longer of Mundus or used to the bounds of the living.

At the center of the long chamber a level space had been chiseled out of the stone. A short, stout pillar of obsidian stood there, four mummies leaning against its base. Its top was hollowed into a shallow bowl. Above, the narrow tip of a single stalactite loomed out of the darkness. A droplet of clear water gathered its weight there, slowly, inexorably… and then, quite startlingly, the drop fell, and its tiny pinging splash echoed through the cavern. Ripples spread in the bowl, in water so clear he had not even known it was there until its disturbance distorted the rock beneath.

But he could not linger. The insistent, meaningless babble in his head pulled him forward. It led him to the low end of the chamber, where floor and ceiling converged and a shallow pool had collected among shattered slabs of stone. Ancestors sat above the water, their bowed heads brushing the low ceiling, and at one edge of the pool a gaping cleft yawned, scissoring sharply into the mountain. Cool air breathed from the gap; mist curled slowly up from the water’s surface near it. The ancestors hissed in his head, and Maissel stepped forward into the darkness.

It was riven stone and narrow twisting passages again, like the entrance, but a hundred times more labyrinthine. The glassy obsidian had fractured as though the mountain had been struck by an enormous hammer, leaving a maze of jagged, interconnected splits made traversable only by the flat stones the Zainab had wedged between the close walls as floor. His mummified ancestors still peered eerily out at him on all sides, bent and wasted and unrelenting, and that strange greenish glow still permeated the air, but their voices had withdrawn, gone suddenly faint in the back of his head. Though the clefts zigged and zagged in all directions, the general trend was down, and so Maissel descended. He wandered aimlessly, not knowing where he was going, his heart of a sudden strangely uncertain, his skin tingling with a chill that grew stronger and stronger the lower he went. All of it looked the same; all gloom, all oppression, all jagged death and frozen decay. He could not keep track of which way he had come and which he should go; a bitter frost chipped at his mind.

And something came, then, to replace the faded voices of his ancestors. A new voice roiled in his skull; rough, raspy, polytonal, and keening, filled with hatred and anger and pain. It muttered disjointed phrases, harsh and grinding, maddened and terrified and vengeful and echoing in twinned sympathy. The air stirred across Maissel’s skin, and he shivered. He had found the haunting. But the malevolent spirit did not seem to object to his presence; its voice hovered in his mind, watching and waiting, chilling his bones and gelling his blood as he wandered hurriedly through the wraithways, but doing nothing more. Its voice – or voices; it sounded almost like two – seemed almost… curious.

He stumbled abruptly out of the jagged passages and into a low alcove. The ceiling was domed and smooth, the marks of merish chisels only faintly visible. Only a single corpse lay therein, its head sunk between the knees pulled tight against its sunken chest. One hand lay open on the stone, and beside it a dark orb. It looked like… it couldn’t be… He bent down. His hand reached forward, quivering. The angry voices peaked in alarm, and a gush of air puffed on his back, cold and bitter. And he snatched up the orb.

He stood, backing away quickly, his heart pounding furiously, sure that the haunting spirit would manifest itself and punish him for stealing from the dead. But the voices subsided into their normal furious rasp, apparently appeased, and he turned the orb over in his numb hands. He couldn’t believe it.

Royal Jelly. He had found Royal Jelly in the ancestral tomb of the Zainab. How? How had it come there? Who had this poor mummy been, in life, to have Royal Jelly in death? He could not fathom it. But he had not come to solve mysteries; he had come to prove himself to the Zainab. So he stowed the Jelly in his pack, putting up the mystery of it in kind, and turned, to vanish back into the maze of fractures. Behind him, the ancient mummy huddled, alone in its segregated alcove, forlorn and isolated.

He moved faster, more confidently as he strode further and further down into the depths of the wraithways. He was focused on his goal; he had to find his father’s corpse, and he could allow nothing to stop him. He would show the Zainab that he was worthy of them; he would be there for Maela and for his child. He was possessed by a sudden ferocity of purpose. So possessed, so focused, so driven was he that he did not sense the fury and hate bunching itself suddenly in his mind, the chill in the palpitating air, the mist swirling around his feet. And so when he reached the bottom of the jagged maze at last, where the splintered passages opened on to a broad flight of chiseled steps rising up to a line of carven pillars, he was unprepared for the screaming blast of icy that snatched him up around the chest and slammed him down onto the stone.

“PURPOSEPROFANEDGOBACKTOBIRTHPLACEPERPETUATORSINSONBEGONEBETRAYERNONESHALLBRINGCOMFORTUNTOETERNITY!”

The voice screamed, echoing between the walls, buffeting his ears. Winds howled; ice crawled like centipedes over his chest. Tendrils of mist swirled above him, and his hair whipped in the unnatural wind as he coughed from the shock of the blow.

“WHOKEPTTHEVOWWHOSLEPTINSINWHOLEFTTHEIRSONWHOTOOKHIMIN!”

The twinned voice roared over him as he scrambled backward frantically on his elbows. The chamber whirled with pale, blue-grey mist, and at its vortex, at the top of the tall steps, a flickering figure paced, booming out its furious spew.

“SHECHOSEFRIENDBROTHERCAPTORINHEARTFLESHNOEASENOAPPEASENOSLEAZEINDEATH!”

Maissel pushed himself to his feet, his body numb, head pounding with terror. The spirit whirled at him, its mists snatching at his hair, his clothes, the heat of his flesh. He gritted his teeth and took a step forward, forcing his way up the stairs. The speed of the swirling wind increased, tore back and forth ferociously, almost as though in conflict with itself.

“YESLAYUSDOWN,” the twin voices boomed from all sides.

“WEAKINFAITHHERETICINGRATECHILDBETRAYERBEGONE!” they screamed, and Maissel screamed too, as their needle songs sliced his ears like the wind’s icy touch did his skin. But still he pushed forward; he had to make it. He was halfway up the steps.

“SOULadvltERERSAVEUSSOLONGSOLONELYBEGONENONESHALLSUCCORSIN!!!!”

And with an unearthly howl, the spirit flew toward him. It pierced his flesh, and his bones felt as though they would split with the pain. His feet were no longer on the ground; the winds had him in their grip, and again and again the wraith streaked through his flesh, devouring his life, his warmth, his hope and love and happiness. It went on and on and on, an unending torment of ice and loss. And Maissel knew that he would die. But in the last moment of sanity, the chandler choked out one final prayer.

“ALMSIVI – SAVE – ME!”

An angry buzz rose in his ears, drowning out the howl of the winds. The cold vanished without warning, leaving him gasping in sudden heat. The winds had dropped him; he lay sprawled on the frostbitten steps. The air was unnaturally still… yet it rang with that growing buzz, that ferocious wraithly snarl. Then, without warning, a new wind blasted out from between the pillars at the top of the steps, a gust boiling with a thousand furies. It snatched him up like paper, flung him back into the jagged maze. His back slammed into the stone, and the wind pinned him there, crushing, skin-tearing, bone-breaking, as it streaked past him through the rock. The haunting spirits’ voice rose again, roaring in fury with the wind and laughing maniacally in bound dichotomy. Then the wind released him, and he fell, senseless, to the ground.

He lay there for minutes, smarting, sore, his head ringing with the continual stream of ancestral vitriol, his heart pounding so hard and fast he thought it might burst; his skin was tight, over-pressurized. He pushed himself up on his knees; his limbs shook; his breath came choking and uncontrollable. He could see nothing. Blackness pressed in on his eyes, angry and pulsating. He had erred. He had erred so badly that even his survival was amazing; he wondered that the ancestors had left him alive, after such a mistake. He had called on the Tribunal in the most sacred hold of the Zainab; blasphemy of the worst class, in the eyes of his ancestors. And they had punished him for it, and withdrawn their assistance; gone was the ghostly green glow that had lit his path through the wraithways. No more could he see through their spiritual eyes.

A sob ripped through his throat. He had failed. He would never be Zainab. He would never be with Maela. He would never see his child. He had failed. And far below the earth, trapped, alone, and bruised in the tomb of his ancestors, Maissel knelt with his forehead pressed to the ancient stone and wept cold, bitter tears.

AN: Annnnd here it is! Took long enough. This chapter's too long for (most) readers in these forums, I know, but it is what it is.

Chapter XIX

A long time later he roused himself, still sniffling and sobbing, the salt of his tears drying in the grooves of his cheeks. He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, holding himself up on the narrow passage’s unseen wall, and stumbled forward, not knowing where he was going, not caring, just moving through the unseen maze flogging himself with the angry whispers of his ancestors. He guided himself with his hands on the walls, but still he stumbled into the rock, cut himself on slivers of unseen stone, bruised his head on corners and overhangs, and he welcomed each injury as no more than he deserved. His hands the mummified corpses of the Zainab as he made his awkward way back up through the wraithways, and each time the forum hissing in his mind spiked in vitriolic offense, and each time he snarled at himself for his daring and murmured fervent, disjointed apologies.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m a disgrace, I’m worthless! I’m sorry,” he cried, and stumbled on into the blackness accompanied only by the censorious whispers of the spirits and his own choked apologies. Ever forward into the darkness he went, seeking the tomb’s egress that he might preserve at least his life, if not his dignity or his dreams. Ever forward, and never progressing; though he fumbled and stumbled his way unceasingly through the narrow passages, he could not find the way out. The dark pressed in on his frenzied mind, and his scrabbling scramble grew ever quicker and more frantic. A stone caught his foot somewhere in that timeless dark, and he sprawled forward on his belly, cheek grinding against the cold slate. The shock of it jolted his thoughts out of their panicked haze.

“Forgive me,” he whispered into the stone. And, “Forgive me,” more loudly, pushing up his quivering body. The ancestors buzzed angrily, unmoved. “I am a poor, ignorant fool,” Maissel’s lips twitched out. “I know nothing. I blasphemed your sepulcher, but I did not do so out of disrespect. Forgive me.” Still there was no change. The chandler sat there in the dark; silent, waiting, repentant. And then, suddenly, something hard and angry welled up in him, and his snapped backward.

“FORGIVE ME!!!”

His scream tore and scraqed through his throat like razors. Its echoes rang through the wraithways, taunting, mocking his breathless, hopeless desperation. But the ancestors made no reply, and in cold clarity, reality dawned in his mind. They would not forgive him his transgression. They would not even allow it to go unpunished. No; instead they meant to keep him there, in their tomb, forever. He was sentenced to death by his own progenitors; death by swift madness and slow starvation.

He trembled as the realization hit him, and this time his quavers were fueled by fury, not fear and dismay. His own ancestors meant to kill him for falling into the habits he had followed for nearly two centuries, for resorting to the faith that had sustained him for his entire life and of which he had never yet been shown the wrong. He had had no Wise Woman to teach him their ways, only the pious words of his devout mother and the village priest. And yet they punished him! He had been among the Zainab mere days, and yet they expected him to be faultless! They did not damn him for his blasphemy, the fools; they damned him for not having been raised to their ways, just like Shabael and the rest of his tribe.

The chandler snarled to himself as he got to his feet once more and began stalking aimlessly through the black passageways. And why should he renounce the Tribunal, anyway? They had served the Dunmer people well, over the years, had bolstered his own heart and mind countless times. He should abandon that because his forefathers and foremothers had different beliefs? He should abandon his faith when the faith of his ancestors had never even been shared with him?

“I won’t do it!” he shouted suddenly to the whispers. “Not until you show me the reason why!” There was no answer, save a noxious spike in the deluge of ethereal audio, and Maissel kicked the stone wall in his fury.

“Damn it, do you not see?” he roared. “Repent I will for having called on the Triunes in your presence, and repent I have; you have witnessed my penitence! Is that not enough?! Do you not see that you condemn me for nothing more than not having had the benefit of your true Velothi instruction?” He panted in the silence; blood pounded tightly in his clenched fists. “As you should see it, you condemn a misguided child for having erred! Is there no one among you who sees the folly, the injustice of this? Is there no one who will speak for me?!”

The voices surged suddenly, fracturing, turning in among themselves angrily, confusedly, uncertainly. Maissel’s eyes stretched wide, attempting futilely to penetrate the dark. His mind rattled with a thousand, a hundred thousand competing voices. An ache began to pulse in his temples.

And then a cool whisper rose above the wraithly hubbub, cold and ephemereal.

“…desissst, you racer broodlingsss…” it sighed. “…an advocate is sssought…trial…is sought. As his sin… is mine… I will test his heart. I claim the Wailing Well… desissst…”

And as that single voice’s hiss faded into silence, so too did the others subside. For the first time since he had entered the burial, it was silence that pressed in on his spiritual ears, not sound. His skin prickled with it, with a sudden apprehension; his fury vanished with the voices. What had he done? What transnecrotic ritual had he invoked? The silence was strangely oppressive, after so long; it chilled his blood with its stillness. But what was he to do? Why had they gone silent?

“…come…” The voice echoed through the passageways borne on the faintest shadow of a breath. His skin tingled; his hands grew cold. And he realized that he could see once more; a faint glimmer of the earlier greenish glow illumined the narrow passage before him. The implications of that fact did not sink in immediately. But when they did, it was as though he had been infused with a fluorescent tincture of fluid hope.

He was seeing through the eyes of the ancestors once more. He was no longer unequivocally condemned. He did not know what – or who – he had called into action, or what he would be asked to do… but he knew that he would make the most of it. He shot into motion, hurrying up through the passages as fast as the dim light and his wobbly legs would allow. The voice had said ‘come’, so come he would. To where, his mind knew not… but his heart was better informed, for he strode forward without hesitation. Water splashed around his ankles, shocking and icy; he had stumbled at last out of the jagged wraithways and back to the bottom of the slanted main cavern. A cold light burned on the slope above, a pale washed out blue shining out from the stalactite hanging above the pillar in the room’s level center; the stone fang’s fractured, crystalline shell glimmered whitely against the darkness. Mist bubbled and frothed from the obsidian pillar’s basin, hovering and curling across the stone floor, bathing the nearby ancestors in cold steam.

“Come,” the ethereal voice echoed again, and this time there was no mistaking its source; it came from the pillar in the center of the room. “Come…” And Maissel went.

The mist chilled his shins and thighs as climbed, but not in the same life-sapping way that those of the haunting spirit had done; this was simply the chill of otherness, not maleficence. It grew more acute the closer he came to the glassy black pillar and its glowing stalactite; his legs went numb with it. His boots clattered on the suddenly level stone beneath the mist as he gained the pillar’s platform. His broad hands shook as he laid them on the stone’s faceted edge and peered down into the seemingly empty basin. There was no response, despite the pale light that suffused his face from the stalactite above.

He bent forward, slowly, nervously, and spoke to the invisible waters.

“I am here –“

“HERE YOU ARE.” The singular voice cut him off immediately. He jumped back in surprise; three drops had tinkled down without warning from the stone tooth above, nearly touching his face. They struck the crystalline water, and the spirit’s words sounded instead of a natural splash. They reverberated through the chamber for as long as the ripples stirred in the basin.

“You have… offended the spirit of the Zainab,” the spirit spoke after a long pause. Water dribbled into the basin.

“That was never my intent,” stuttered Maissel, laying his palms gingerly once more on the obsidian pillar and gazing down into its shallow pool. “I have only ever intended honor to my ancestors. That my words were spoken on the cusp of death is no valid excuse, but that I was not raised to your ways is valid, with all respect, honored ancestor.”

Another long pause before the next droplets of water flashed through the air.

“It is excuse… enough,” rang the voice. “At least, enough to earn… a chance at redemption.”

The chandler swallowed convulsively as the words echoed through the chamber. “Redemption is all I wish,” he choked. “But, honored spirit… I will not revoke my reverence for Almsivi without due cause.”

“The honor… of your better ancestors… is no cause?” Around him, the mist swirled suddenly.

“I have been taught that the Tribunal, too, are my better ancestors,” whispered Maissel. “Can you prove their unworthiness?”

The chamber was silent for a long moment. Then the ripples spread once more through the crystal liquid.

“We cannot prove… the treachery… of the Three,” the voice sighed. “For the Velothi were… left to guard the entrance… to the Dwemer hold, that day. None saw… what befell Nerevar… beneath Red Mountain.”

“So as I speak for the Zainab… we are prepared… to overlook your dissension,” the waters hissed. “So long as you do not present it before ussss, again… and raise your children… to our waysss…”

“I swear it,” he answered softly. A tendril of mist swung softly up, stroked down his cheek. He shivered.

“Accepted,” intoned the spirit representative. “Accepted. We will forgive your… blasphemy. Yet still… the Zainab demand atonement.”

Maissel clenched his jaw firmly; his hands gripped the stone convulsively. “I am ready,” he said firmly. His heart pounded in his ears.

The spirit did not answer immediately; the waters remained flat and invisible. The mist roiled in front of him, dancing with snatches of shapes and figures.

“You came here… to correct an ancient sin,” whispered the voice when it came at last. “You came to… serve the Zainab.”

Maissel frowned. “I came here to prove my worthiness to our people,” he objected, but the spirit ignored him.

“Complete this ssservice… as only you can… and your sins will be erased.”

“What is this service, then?” he asked.

The stalactite dribbled sibilant sighs. “You have met… the Wrathful Cuckold. Know his… names… the names we have kept… from our Wise Women… so long. He is – is… one half your father… one fourth your grandfather…”

“Kaushad?” gasped Maissel.

The mist writhed, shedding tiny strips and drifting tendrils. “Wrong… half,” the voice rang as water sparkled through the air. “Kaushad was maker of cuckolds… never cuckold himself. No… we are haunted by your other father… by Aravel Sarethi.”

He could not speak. His chest felt wrapped in bands of ice. The voice went on, slow and uninflected. Soft strands of mist caressed his cheeks in a parody of comfort.

“He bore all his life… the pain of a loveless wife and… another mer’s son. Now his spirit is… unwilling… to allow Kaushad the warmth of… your mother’s spirit… the warmth he never had in life… his anger and pain… have drawn another to his purpose… in sympathy… Uroshnor…”

His throat unstuck. “My grandfather was cuckolded?” he grated harshly.

“… … … yes… “ whispered the voice reluctantly. “His spirit is… more magnanimous in his disgrace… than Aravel’s… he did not punish usss… until your half-father came… their situations are too similar… Uroshnor is bound now in shared archetype… by Aravel’s anguish… and with the Ashkhan’s strength… the haunting is too powerful for usss to dispel...”

Maissel stared down at the smoothing water. He could not believe what he was hearing.

“But – but Uroshnor spoke to me,” he stammered. “He told me to come here.”

“His binds… are not absolute,” the voice answered. “For strong calls… for perilous purpose… he may break free… but only you may free him… and ease Aravel Sarethi’s long pain…”

“Why?” he rasped. “Why me?”

The mists smoothed, soft and diffuse, and the spirit answered.

“Because…” it whispered, “you are the only fat-smith.”

He shook his head roughly. “Maela’s mother thought I would know this sort of thing as well. But I do not. Whatever your ancient fat-smiths knew is long lost.”

“Not lossst,” echoed the spirit, and suddenly the mist contorted in the air on the other side of the basin. “Not lost,” it repeated, “for I remain. I… will teach you what you need… for I was the last fat-smith of the Zainab.” And the mists parted, and a pale grey figure was there, part of the mist, and yet beyond it. A womer, in bulky skirts, her face obscured. She drifted sideways toward him, circling around her vocal instrument.

“You have… an ancient secret of my craft…” she said, and her voice still came with the dripping water. “The Jelly… that was lost to the settled people… and whose warmth… eases all woes… fulfills all wants…” Her form slid toward him, and then broke over his flesh without pause, like the mist of which she was composed, only to reform without pause at his other side.

“The Royal Jelly?” said Maissel, hurriedly rummaging in his pack and extracting the dark, waxed orb. “The Jelly can appease my father’s spirit?” he asked, watching the ghost as it continued its circling drift.

“Not… as it is…” she answered. “Your father’s discontent… is rooted in dissatisfaction. He prevents Kaushad from enjoying in death that which he… never did in life… the spiritual warmth of your mother.” The ghostly figure raised a drifting arm. “To lay your half-father to rest… let him experience… just once… that which he desiresss… use the Jelly…”

“How?” gasped the chandler in frustration. “I don’t understand!”

“Go to your mother…” the swirling figure replied, “gather the fat… of her briast. Add a new layer… to the Jelly. Then… Aravel may taste of contentment… and will ease down, to his rest… and release Uroshnor at last…”

There was a long moment of silence as Maissel digested the spirit’s words. His father – Aravel – had been haunting the Zainab tomb for nearly one hundred and fifty years. His grandfather had too, in a sense. His mother had never loved Aravel, it seemed, but only Kaushad, though how the two had even met he could not fathom. And he had to melt down the preserved fat of her briasts as a new layer upon the Royal Jelly he had found. He could barely wrap his mind around it. The spirit watched him, swirling in silence.

“I understand, honored fat-smith,” he managed at last. “But I do not understand. I do not know where my mother rests.”

“You know,” sighed the wraith. “She held the Jelly… awaiting your arrival… so many cold years…”

He stared down at the dark orb in his hand. The Jelly. She held the Jelly… the corpse. The corpse where he had found it… that was his mother. Ghanimah. She had been in the tomb of the Zainab, all those years… exactly where she would have wanted to be, he realized. For she loved Kaushad, if the fat-smith’s spirit was correct. But no, that wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t exactly where she would have wanted to be. She braved the terrors of battle with the Ahemmusa because she saw Kaushad – his father. She wouldn’t have wanted to rest in this tomb, alone and spiritually isolated by Aravel’s pained vengeance; she would have wanted to rest in the arms of her lover. He felt it, with a certainty that resonated in his bones.

“Go…” whispered the spirit.

And he went. Off, down the misted stone slope, stumbling in his haste as he stuffed the waxed Jelly back in his pack, splashing through the icy water and into the jagged maze. He dashed with swift surety through the narrow passageways under the deathly, watchful eyes of his mummified ancestors, his steps coming with unshakeable faith that the spirits would guide him to his destination. And so they did; there was the low, separated alcove, with its domed ceiling and single occupant; his mother, poor Ghanimah, her ancient emaciated, bandaged body hunched, grey, and pathetic on the stones. His heart ached for her. So long imprisoned by her husband’s spirit; so long alone. But then something stirred in the air before her, and he realized that she was not alone, and had not been alone. The haunting spirit was with her. His father was with her.

“Ghanimah Ghanimah sweet sweet girl. Why so cold so proper so unfurled…” The words seeped softly out from the dark, billowing figure between Maissel and his mother. “Never warm for ME. Never conceived for ME. What did you want? Was it… the lizard kiss? Would that have warmed your womb enough to bear a babe? But… what is it? What was it? This kiss, this reptile, this strangeness… I – I seem to remember – didn’t I? – but, no, that was the other… oh, Ghanimah, Ghanimah, so unfortunately named…” The words subsided into unintelligible murmurs. Maissel took a single, careful step into the alcove.

The spirit spun around, form suddenly whirling in the bitter whipping wind that bit at the chandler’s flesh without warning.

“BETRAYERBACKGONOAPPEASENO!”

Its face contorted horribly, and its arms raised in menace, but Maissel stepped stoutly forward.

“Let me by!” he shouted. “I am Maissel Sarethi, grandson of Uroshnor, son of Kaushad, foster of Aravel, son of Ghanimah! I have the right here! Let me by!”

The ghost started, its unearthly winds fading slightly. “BOLDFOSTERadvltERERSONSOBOLD!” it cried. “FATSMITHAPOLOGIESPROFESS?” Its wispy outline flickered in the slowing air.

“I bear no apologies for you, father,” grated Maissel loudly, steeling himself. “I have done you no wrongs. But I come to ease your pains, and those of my grandfather, Uroshnor.” He stepped gingerly forward, his boot breaking the low crust of mist.

“RESTSLEEPHEAL?” howled the spirit wonderingly. The timbre of its voice shifted slightly, to a deeper, richer register. But then, “APPEASENOAPPEASENEVERBEGONE!” it screamed, and its form dissolved as the air went abruptly icy and erupted in a tempestuous whirlwind.

Maissel abandoned caution, running straight into the spirit’s bitter fury, into the swirling winds and cutting howls. His skin tingled and his bones ached; all was a confused mess of motion and pale light, but he managed to find his mother’s corpse in the center of the maelstrom. He knelt down beside her, face contorted in pain, and fumbled with frozen fingers at his belt for the two knives Derch had given him.

“BLASPHEMVIOLATincistOR!” his father’s maddened spirit screeched by his ear, and for a moment his flesh ached with that same sapping cold that had nearly killed him before. But it lessened abruptly, and the voice roared again, deep and agonized.

“HOLDPAINCUCKOLDSON,” it bellowed. “FATSMITHSOOTHESFATSMITHHELPSHOLD!”

He had the long serrated knives in his broad hands, poised and shaking above his mother’s bandaged corpse. The winds ripped around him, howling like winter’s heart, tearing at his thin grey hair and echoing with the struggling roars and skirls of his father and grandfather, but they did not sap, they did not kill. The strength of Uroshnor had come through for his people one last time.

Maissel’s hands trembled as he gently laid his mother’s corpse out flat on the stone, straightening the long-bent elbows and knees to expose the sunken chest. He stared down where her eyes had once been beneath the grey cloth, down at her featureless face, and he whispered a prayer to her silent spirit, a prayer that was devoured by the howling winds, as the knives tremored in his hands. Then the blades plunged down, through the ancient fabric over the corpse’s sternum; his work was begun, and his hands were as steady as stone. He ripped the ash-grey cloth up the center of the chest and parted it gently with the tips of his serrated blades, exposing the wasted but incredibly preserved black flesh below. His knife bit into his mother’s waxy skin, incising a neat slice across her chest. Then the blades slid beneath the skin, peeling it back from the ribs and from the yellowish nodules of cured fat lobes. And, working calmly, smoothly, certain as if he worked on the flesh of a guar, ignorant of the tempest struggling around him, Maissel carved away the fat of his mother’s briasts.

He pushed himself to his feet when he had done, when the yellowish, waxy lumps had been carefully stowed away, and sheathed his blades hurriedly. He gave his mother one final prayer of thanks, then backed away out of the alcove. The haunting spirit ignored him, still writhing and struggling with itself, whirling above his mother and her gaping burial bandages. But as he left, the spirit began to coalesce once more, Aravel’s voice predominating, confused and panicked; Uroshnor’s interference had reached its limit.

“WHATDONEWHOTOOKPROFANER!” it screamed at him, its grey figure bunching and contorting with its boundless fury and desperation. “FAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAIL!” it roared, and leaped toward him, a steaming stream of smoke. He threw up his hands, in futility, but the spirit flashed past him harmlessly. “SHESHALLNOTSUCCORFAITHLESSphalus!” its howling voice echoed as it vanished into the maze of jagged passages. “FINALRECOURSEFEARBUTYOUWILLFAILFATSMITHFINALRECOURSE!!!! None shall succor siiiiiiiin…” The scream faded into silence.

Maissel stared after it for a long moment, his heart thudding loudly in his ears. For a moment there he had thought all had been for naught. But no; Aravel merely returned to his ancient duty, to warding against all communication between Ghanimah and Kaushad. His once-father’s spirit had been maddened for so long that it could not even realize that Maissel meant Ghanimah’s warmth for Aravel, this time, not Kaushad. But no matter; he would learn soon enough. Maissel hurried away through the maze.

The main chamber was as he had left it; the obsidian basin, overflowing with mist; the glowing stalactite above it; the ancient fat-smith’s spirit swirling slowly around it all. He approached carefully, reverently. The spirit greeted him with a hundred stroking hands drifting slowly out of the mist.

“I have the fat of Ghanimah,” he said.

The basin rippled swiftly. “Good…” the spirit sighed. “Good… now you must amend… the Jelly. Take this…”

An object ripped suddenly through the fog and clattered into the obsidian bowl with a splash. Blank eye sockets stared up at him, distorted by soundless waves; the object was a jawless skull.

“Take it…” the spirit whispered. And Maissel slid his fingers through the cold, pure water, and pulled out the dripping skull by its blank eyes.

“This… will be your cauldron…” the wraith murmured. “Place your mother’s fat within… and I will light the flame…”

Silently, Maissel obeyed, emptying the last droplets of water from the cranium and tremblingly replacing them with the small lumps of cured, yellowish fat he had sliced from his mother’s chest. He did not know what he was doing; he was chilled to the bone by what he had done, but he obeyed, full up with faith in his ancestors.

“Place it there,” the spirit spake. A hand of mist trailed through the air above the water, and Maissel cautiously extended the skull forward. It jumped from his hand without warning as a burst of cold green flames burst in midair. It hovered there, a floating domed bone licked by unnatural emerald flames.

“Now…” hissed the spirit as the flames crackled coldly. “Apprentice again, master-smith… learn your craft as the Zainab practiced it of old. I know the ways… I was the last… I killed the craft… and I birth it anew…”

Maissel frowned momentarily. She killed the craft? What did that mean? But her voice rang out without pause.

“You know… fat. I feel your knowledge… deep, natural, unfettered… but lacking… you know the flesh of guar, of nix, of alit, of kwama, of the vegetable world… but you do not know your own. You have never used the flesh… of your ancestors…”

“Feel it, fat-smith,” the spirit whispered, whirling around him. “Feel your mother’s flesh begin to melt. This… is the fruit of life, smith… hard won from the world. Fat is… the purest fleshly storage of potential… of the capacity for change… of power… feel that concentration of strength… your mother won this… from the world, smith. By her worthiness it endures. This is her… soul-strength incarnate. Sense it… give thanks for it… bring the spirit that won it to its surface…” The ethereal voice wrapped him up in its cool tendrils; the words ensnared his mind, and, bit by bit he began to feel – something. A warmth. A consciousness. A presence, slumbering and convectively stirring, concentrated in the floating skull before him.

“Yes… this is your mother, smith… in fatty indwelling… now ask her blessing… ask her permission to use her power in flesh purified… for your ends…”

And Maissel bowed his head to the floating skull, and prayed to his mother. He prayed for his mother, in sympathy and lament for her long spiritual imprisonment, for whatever tragedy had made her to love an Ashlander chieftain and then torn her from his arms in life and death. He prayed to her in thanks, for nourishing him within her flesh, for making her body his tunnel into the world. He prayed for hope, that soon he would be able to repay her kindness by ending her long loneliness. And he prayed for forgiveness, for her forgiveness to her aching husband. He whispered to her of the mer’s beneficence, in sheltering her and her son after her advltery, of the pain his choice had caused him, and the pain his spirit still endured in madness and vengeance. He begged her to grant unto the haunting specter a single boon – a single taste of the love and warmth she had always withheld, to ease his suppurating soul.

There was no answer to his entreaties, at least not in words. Yet – somehow, Maissel did not expect one. His spirit guide’s words had trailed off long ago, but some awakened instinct in his oily chandler’s heart had taken their place. His was a business of flesh, not air; his mother’s spirit was with him, suffusing her bubbling briast-fat, but it was the simple, fundamental part of her, the ghostly ectoplasmic flesh. There could be no words from such a manifestation. Instead, the warmth he had sensed grew within him, eased the cured fat from its hardened rind and into languid, liquid malleability. It burgeoned and granted and welled up its power in his heart, and he knew that she was ready.

The Royal Jelly was in his hands; the edge of one knife sliced away the wax covering. The cold, hard outer rind was pale white, streaked with flecks of red.

“Comforts of flesh,” he whispered, raising the orb, “embodied in flesh. The hoardings of life discharged in compaction. Let the pleasures of your flesh and the warmth of your soul season this Jelly, my mother. Join your comforts to these. For your son, for your husband, for your lover, and for the Zainab. Soothe the Wrathful Cuckold, Ghanimah.” And with a gentle plop, the Jelly dropped into the liquid fat bubbling in the floating skull’s cavity.

The ghostly flames vanished immediately, but still the jawless skull hung in the air, twisting slowly.

“You have my… a natural talent for the craft…” his ancient fat-smith guide whispered after a long, silent pause. “You have done… well. The Jelly is nearly complete… take it back to the Cuckold… let him taste of its lipid largess… proud… you make me proud… but swift… the Wailing Well grows… weary. I will cool the Jelly, Maissel, fat-smith of the Zainab… and add my own tribute… goodbye… twice-seeded son of sons…”

The hot skull tumbled down into the crystalline water, and with a great hiss the stalactite above was suddenly engulfed in roiling steam. The mist around him dissipated abruptly into faint tatters and fading ribbons; his guide was gone, back to the spirit world, back to the ancestral forum. She saved him from his ancestor’s condemnation, showed him the true nature of his craft, and vanished without even telling him her name. He owed his life and happiness to a nameless spirit.

It was lamentable, but he forced himself to put the wondering from his mind as he stepped up to the obsidian pillar; he still had business to which to attend. The basin was truly empty, this time; its crystal water had condensed above on the dark stalactite. He lifted the fat filled skull from the stone, gingerly, afraid it would yet be hot, but it was cool as spring rain. White fat filmed its eyes, its nose cavity, hard and smooth. The spirit had done well. He had done well. He had begun to learn the ways of ancient Velothi chandlery, as Maela’s mother had told him he must, what seemed like centuries past. That part of his trial, at least, he had passed.

But there was still the rest of it to be done, and so he hurried away down the sloped slab of the once more dusk filled cavern. Again through the jagged maze, guided by ghostly ancestor sight; again to the isolated alcove where his mother’s corpse had huddled all those years. To ease Aravel’s spirit was his goal, yes, and then to obtain his father’s suet, but he had made a promise to his mother’s spirit, in his fat-smithing prayer. Ghanimah and Kaushad had been separated most of their lives and deaths; he would end their loneliness.

And so he bent down in that low alcove, bent down over the prone mummy’s shredded bandages. He slid his arms gently under her grey sticklike legs, behind her dry, bandaged skull, and lifted his mother into his arms. The skull fell against his chest in a chilling parody of a live womer’s snuggle; the bony feet clattered together. But Maissel was unmoved, save by quiet reverence; this was his mother – that she was dead was almost irrelevant. He carried her slowly down through the fractured maze, stepping soft and careful. The air was heavy; silent and gravid.

The wide, chiseled stone stairs opened before him as he emerged from the last narrow passage. There was no movement in the high chamber, no stirring in the gloom between the pillars at the top of the stairs. The haunting spirit was nowhere to be seen or heard. Still, it was with caution that Maissel mounted the steps with his mother’s emaciated corpse. He knew in his bones that the Cuckold would show itself again. He was prepared for the shock of its presence.

But when it came, it came with the cold creeping stealth of moonlight. He reached the top of the stairs, where the line of stone pillars fronted a long gallery of carven graves; the entrance to the constructed, formal mausoleum of the Zainab. One second he stood there alone, peering carefully into the gloom; the next, a pale grey figure leaned quietly against the pillar beside him, its form flickering and shifting between two separate superimpositions.

“Son slips in to succor sin, “ it whispered, and its voice throbbed with melancholy. “Forever the faithless intend to win.”

“You do not understand, father,” growled Maissel hurriedly, turning to the spirit. “I’ve come to help you!”

“So once I believed,” answered the wraith in Uroshnor’s deeper voice. “But come you are with traitor in hand for softness and sense upon the rake to land!” The figure began to quaver more rapidly as the voice slipped into high, keening tones. “And behind matriarch meat shield YOU COWER ON THE FIELD!”

“Wait!” shouted Maissel frantically into the wind’s sudden, ear-splitting howl. “Give me a chance!”

“LOVELYTRAITOR’SSANCTITYSAKENOHARMTOBEFALL!” the swelling spirit screamed, growing ever less coherent. “BUTCONJOINphalusNEVERWE’LLWARDYOUFROMALL!”

And the ghost roared forward, through him, like a flash of ice, and then it was swirling between the pillars, screaming. Its misty figure thinned, dissipated, until it stretched like a translucent whirling wall across the entrance to the mausoleum. There it stayed, a membranous stream like pale grey water, its voices whispering in unceasing agony.

And Maissel moaned in despair. A ghostfence. The Cuckold had formed a ghostfence between the chandler and Kaushad’s corpse. Rather than attack him and risk doing injury to Ghanimah’s corpse or allow him to complete his errand, the dipartite spirit had sacrificed its own autonomy to form an impenetrable barrier around Kaushad’s corpse.

“No no no no no no!” he growled desperately as he knelt down to lay his mother’s corpse aside on the stone. “No! You cannot do this to me, father! Grandfather! You cannot do this to me!” He slammed the heel of his fist against the barrier, futilely; it was as solid as steel. “Aravel!” he roared to the wall. “Uroshnor! I am Maissel Sarethi, fat-smith of the Zainab, and I have your salvation! But you must release this barrier if you are to receive it!” There was no answer, save the malevolent whispers. He stared at the wall for a long, horrified moment.

“NO!” he roared suddenly, “NO! You cannot do this to me! I succeeded, damn it! I proved myself a Zainab fat-smith! You cannot let it end this way! I won’t let you!” He pounded the barrier with his fists, slammed it with his shoulder, kicked it with his chitin boots, but there was no change in its ethereal surface. He stumbled away, panting, wiping desperate sweat from his forehead. “This cannot happen,” he muttered. “This. Can. Not. HAPPEN!” His voice scraqed in his throat. Maela’s dimpled face and swollen belly flashed through his head, and he choked suddenly on the pain burning in his chest.

“No!” he snarled, screwing up his eyes. “I will not let it end this way. You will know my mother’s warmth, Cuckold, if I have to shove it down your spiritual throat myself!” He fell to his knees, pulling his pack over his shoulder and fumbling for the Jelly filled skull where he had stowed it; he was on his feet, facing the spirit’s fence, his broad palms clenched around the skull. They flashed up, above his head, then down, to crack with a resounding ring against the wall. It stood, unshaken. Again, the skull crashed down in the chandler’s huge hands; again, the collision rang through the chamber; again, the wall did not budge.

“By all the ancestors,” the chandler growled in infuriated craze, his bloody eyes wild, the skull high above his grey head, “it will not end this way!” The bone dropped in a third swing.

And it cracked against the wraith’s membranous shield. One entire side of the cranial cavity simply shattered, the shards and flakes that had not been driven into the fat by the impact clattering to the ground.

Maissel sank to his knees before the barrier, cold and empty. His forehead rested against its immaterial support as he stared, unseeing, into the mausoleum beyond. His arms were still stretched above his head, holding the smashed skull where it had struck the ghostfence. There was nothing for him. No hope. No recourse. He had failed. Once more, he had fallen short. He would never again hold plump Maela in his arms. He would never see his child. His life had turned to ash in the tomb of his ancestors.

But as he knelt there, catatonic, something changed in the Cuckold’s spirit wall. It… pulsed. Shivered. It convulsed against his forehead, and he sat back, staring, pulling the skull down into his lap as he did so. And with the skull, like a trailing shroud, the wraithly wall pulled forward. His lungs tightened in shock, and, fearful, he looked down at what he held in his hands.

The Jelly was vanishing from within the ancient skull; bit by bit, bite by tiny tooth marked bite, devoured by an invisible maw. The spirit had pooled in his lap, amorphous and hovering and utterly fixated on the Jelly he held. Its touch was no longer icy, but rather hot, like sultry summer air wreathing his body. And suddenly the spirit shivered and split, and it was two ectoplasmic ribbons that surrounded him, separate, but equally consumed with consumption, feeding insatiably on the Jelly proffered in his broad hands. He was shrouded in the spirits of Aravel and Uroshnor, and in the echoes of the unsurpassable fulfillment his father was experiencing. The spirit devoured the flesh of the mother from the hands of the son and the cup of the dam, and knew satisfaction for the first time in its long life and longer unlife.

Then the Jelly was gone, and there was only the spirit basking wonderingly, awfully, achingly, in the contentment of both flesh and spiritual warmth. It engulfed him in its hot mist, indecently, erotically, its boiling ectoplasm unwittingly stroking his soul. And then, with one long, satisfied sigh… it was gone.

He stared down at his empty hands. His empty hands; the remnants of the skull, too, had vanished. A halting smile trembled on his lips. Was it possible? Had he really succeeded, after all his struggles, all his despair? Had his father really just devoured the Jelly from his hands, or had he imagined the whole thing in his anguish? Had his mind cracked under the strain? But no; the skull was gone, the spirit was gone, and the way forward was free!

He coughed suddenly in sobbing laughter. The way forward was free! He could complete his trial! He pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, laughing and crying, running his hands wonderingly through his thin grey hair. Success. Had done it. He scooped his mother’s corpse up from the stone with a light heart, cradled her close against his chest. She had done it, with her sweet generosity. And she would receive her reward.

He strode forward boldly, boots ringing on the dry mortared stones in the mausoleum’s long gallery. The walls were set with low alcoves, there, where his mummified ancestors lay prone and showered with offerings; incense, gems, flowers, jewelry, and weapons of all kinds. Here was where the most honored of the Zainab ancestors rested. He had but little attention for them, though, despite his natural reverence for the place; his heart was too full, and his mind occupied by just one ancestor.

He found him deep in the gloom filled gallery. His steps slowed, and turned of their own accord with the whispering encouragement in his heart. There was his father. Kaushad Fruitful [censored], laid long alone in his sepulchral shelf, an emaciated, bandaged form wreathed in blackened flowers. His bony hands were incredibly broad. Maissel knelt before the body, wordlessly, bowing his head over his mother’s corpse. He could feel Kaushad’s spirit watching in his mind, but the time was not for speech; what more could be said, after the trials that had gone before? He had succeeded; here he was, fat-smithery mastered, the Cuckold laid to rest, his father’s lover removed from her long quarantine. There was nothing to be said, so he simply prayed in silence, in the unvoiced approval of his blood-father’s regard. Then he stood, and settled the corpse of Ghanimah in beside that of Kaushad, her head nestled on the mer’s wasted chest, one bony leg stretched across his. A single kiss pressed to each of their cloth-wrapped foreheads sealed their spirit-bed. He pulled back, smiling, ready to at last complete the final step of his trial. But something caught at his mind, suddenly; his gaze snagged on a dry wisp of hair trailing from his mother’s skull. Something told him to slice it free and wrap it carefully up in his belt pouch, and only then did he move down, to the Ashkhan corpse’s crotch. The cloth there had already been disturbed – of course; Shabael, when retrieving the baculum that pierced his tongue so obscenely. Maissel shook his head wryly.

“A thousand thanks for your gifts, my father,” he whispered to the corpse. “May we both be worthy of them. Ancestors be praised.”

And deep beneath the earth in the ancient halls of death, of history, of long forgotten feuds and undying loves, deep in the cradle of the chandler’s being, two serrated chitin blades rasped from their sheathes and began slicing away the hardened suet from the loins of Kaushad Fruitful [censored].

Chapter XX

Chana’s wedding had crumbled into ashes. Gone were the fragrance-fresh flowers lining the chapel; they had faded into brittle, slumped shadows. Gone were the warm hustlings and bustlings of pre-marital preparation; they had whirled away from her and left only silence and stillness. Gone were her bright fever dreams, of holy matrimony and reverential conjugation, of domestic divinity and inviolate independence, of post-coital languor and transnatal revelations, of all the simple glories and everyday beauties a young womer like her could expect from an old mer like Maissel. The hope of happiness had sparked in her heart, had burned and burgeoned all through that happy year, and then the Velothi wind had come, and swept that tiny burst of heat up into a conflagration that devoured her dreams like the fat of one of her fiancée’s candles. The wind had come, and destroyed, and vanished into the night with the remnants of her transmogrified wedding in its maw. It left her as the sole testimony, the lonely unburned timber, bereft and empty and aching that that Velothi wind had not swirled those metamorphic flames onto her flesh as well as onto her groom’s, that it had not galloped away with her in its grip, as well, on its long dance back to the lands of ash. Would that she had heard those Ashlanders in the chapel, when they came a-kidnapping! Would that she had rushed out to save her husband and been likewise captured by the brutes! Would that they had borne her back to their barbarous camp, back to their ignominious bonds and forbidden touches, back to their ashy imprisonment, with the rest of her wedding’s remains. At least then she would have had a wedding, however strange, however dark and perverted and disturbing its consummation. At least then she would not still be empty in her bride-veil, in her unshredded hyman shroud.

But empty she was, and empty she would remain. Empty of hope; empty of thought; empty of tears; empty of fears. Empty of life. Two days since she should have been a wife, and no sign had been found of her husband in the surrounding wilds, not even tracks. She had no words for her distraught family, no sympathy to soothe the tears of her mother and sister, no screams to satisfy the expectations of her people and spur their scouts into sedulousness. She knelt, unceasingly, unfeelingly, silent and still in the chapel that should have seen her wed, wrapped up in the thin kresh linen veil that by her husband should have been shred; her long body was cold and dark and frozen beneath its transparent folds. She had only the emptiness, only the catatonia that the Ashlander wind had left her by leaving her. Three days since her ashen marriage, and yet null was the word.

The fourth day saw the Zainab’s annual arrival atop the ancient heights, saw their dark bowled yurts huddling against the grey sky, ready to tumble away again at the slightest whim, the softest wind. And for that, Chana roused, for that something flared in her heart, for the whims of the wind were the whims of that people, of the people whose tribal blood had swept away her wedding. She roused, and rabbled, and raised up her army. A scythe-bristling delegation strode away up the hill; Vos’ stony-jawed farm-mer and their wives with Hetman and healer and apprentice Yakin Bael at their side. Chana had to chivvy them to it, for they balked at the thought of confronting outright their ancient rivals; she shamed them and tamed them, and for the first time in centuries, Vos marched forth.

The Zainab were surprisingly obliging, the villagers found as Chana’s father held forth before the pierced Ashkhan on his own ground. Why no, it had not been they who stole their chandler away, Shabael’s long smooth tongue spun out when the explanation was through. And neither had they heard of or seen a capture by one of the other tribes on their way to their winter watering hole. He commiserated with Chana with wandering eyes, sounding far too sincere in his wish to return her groom to her side to have lied. She should know; she had watched the work of that tongue with a sick fixation from the instant it began its beguiling work in that wide mouth to the moment it ceased and slipped out to wet his underlip. She watched for deceit, of course – of course! – for Ashlanders were renowned for the ease of their lies, and the tongue of this Shabael looked even smoother than most. Was that a piercing she had seen? Surely not; it couldn’t be. What a ridiculous thought.

“We would be happy to assist you in your search,” he said with a smile. “I’ll send my four fastest scouts to scour the area. Why don’t you come back in a few days? Perhaps we will have something for you.”

So the villagers left satisfied and soothed, for nothing in the chieftain’s manner had suggested what they had thought to suspect, and young Yakin had not spied the bulky brute who had tied him tight during the capture; the Zainab had most certainly not participated in the ill-timed kidnapping. There was just no question of it. After having met them, who would expect otherwise? They were fine, upstanding mer, as it turned out, not the barbarians the villagers had thought! They even offered their help! Surely, with that, Chana’s fiancée would be found and her womerhood soon finalized. So they assured her with gruff comforting murmurs, again and again as they returned to their town. Chana was unconvinced. But it had been an Ashlander wind that had stolen her Maissel; perhaps a different Ashlander wind could blow him back. She returned from the Ashkhan with her heart kindled once more.

Two more days passed, more reasonable in pastime for the disappointed bride, albeit unlessened in their fixation upon her troubles. Two days, and then it was back up to the camp to see the Ashkhan – to check for her groom, this time accompanied by a guard that was more token than terrifying. Shabael received her beneath the khanumbra in the cold noon, with a tight smile and a hard bow.

“Welcome to our fires, muthsera,” he grated, his lava eyes glowing in his demonic face. She shivered as the bones quivered in his flesh, as the tip of tooth and tongue peeked between his lips; the wind was quite chilling. “No news, I fear,” he said, spreading his broad palms apologetically before the stiff, silent, cloak-wrapped womer. “My scouts have not returned. I do expect them soon, however, so perhaps – if you wished – you might wait among us for their arrival…?”

Chana looked away from his harsh-lined eyes, biting her lips as she stared down at the rugs layered around the Ashkhan’s fire pit. She did want to stay, to be there if her chandler was to be found, but there was the matter of that girl. Maela. She had no fear of that girl any longer – Maissel belonged to Chana; they were to be married – but still, she certainly didn’t want to see her. Or her obscene curves. “I don’t think so,” she mumbled, glancing up swiftly, then away. “I should get back to the village. Send word if you find him!” She snapped the last sentence, flaring suddenly with fiery vehemence.

Shabael nodded slowly, eyes sliding back up to her face. “Of course,” he grated softly, “run away down to your stronghold. Someone will come to collect you if we find your –“

“Ashkhan!” a harsh voice broke in from behind her. “Derch has returned!”

“You may be in luck,” Shabael grunted, stepping eagerly past her. “My scouts have returned. Let us see if they bring with them one of your people.” He bounced on his toes, eager. She shivered at his side, eyes wide, her entire body clenched tight and stiff with a strange tension that bore no resemblance to hope, staring down at the rest of the camp from the khanumbra’s slight promontory. A broad, beefy Ashlander emerged from between the yurts, followed by a taller and thinner warrior and a scandalously armored young womer. The three approached the Ashkhan, faced identical in grimness. Hadn’t he said he sent four scouts? His four fastest? The big one did not look swift at all.

“You return alone,” growled Shabael as the three arranged themselves in a line before him. “You have not found the chandler? His bride-to-be, here, is most anxious.” His voice was grave, but its severity sounded strangely hollow… a gloating lightness lay beneath the surface.

The three scouts blinked and gaped in shock, staring at her, and then as one began scowling fiercely – at the Ashkhan, oddly, not at her. Well, the red-haired young womer did sneer at her, but only momentarily.

“The fat-smith is lost,” the wide-jawed mer bit out grimly at Shabael. “He – was not – to be found after the allotted time – and so we have returned.” His black eyes flickered toward her, and they were bizarrely soft. Was she missing something? But she could not think on it, for the meaning of his words wiped all else from her mind. The fat-smith – the chandler – her Maissel – was still not found. Her hope was gone.

Shabael shook his head. “It is lamentable,” he said. “You have my condolences, muthsera. Keep hope. Perhaps you will find your mer yet. Husbands turn up in all kinds of unlikely places and situations.”

She nodded once, blinking furiously to keep back her tears. She knew he would not be found. “Th- thank you,” she choked out, staring down and pulling her black cloak tighter around her thin body. “I should… I should go.” And go she did, without consultation; she launched herself off down the rocky slope, leaned stiffly forward in grief stricken focus on the village below, stumbling yet swift as air, as wind-borne dust. Her token bodyguards – Vuroni Drenim with his hammer and a few of the Elvuls with their scythes – had to run to keep pace with her, so fast did she flash away from them. Maissel was dead. The Zainab did not have him; the Zainab could not find him. He must have been captured by one of the other tribes – the Ahemmusa, most likely. And there was no chance that he would return from their clutches, from their chafing ropes and blinding hoods, from their gags and tortures. He was dead, and her wedding was dead with him.

So she tumbled down the hillside, throwing her cloak off into the wind as she went so the icy air could stab through her thin shroud, so it could scraqe its teeth along her pebbled skin. She welcomed that wind, embraced its screaming ribbons with upraised arms and screwed up eyes; let it sweep her up, let it steal her, let it carry her over its cold shoulders into the lands of ash whence it had borne the rest of her marriage. She would welcome it. But the wind could do nothing but numb her, nothing but chill her empty flesh to the bone. It streamed past her, left her behind once again as it tumbled away unto the horizon. A heavy, warm weight settled around her shoulders. Drenim was at her side, wrapping her up in her cloak, pinning her down to the earth with soft comfort, when she longed to swirl away into the harsh aether. Worried voices rang around her, but she could not understand them. They gabbled superfluously, yapping their ridiculous comforts into the air. The wind stole those, too, but it would not steal her. She was not fit to be stolen. She walked on, mindlessly, mechanically, staring dully into the distance. She would go back to the chapel, back where her chandler had vanished, back where it had all gone wrong, back where the wind had left her. She would stay there, in prayer, beseeching Almsivi to bring back her fiancée… and if that could not be… well, she would beg the Black Hands of Mephala to kindle her flesh to the flames that had devoured all her dreams, and she would marry ash in truth.

High above her, forgotten on the heights, the Ashkhan watched the spectacle with his gulakhans, silently surprised.

“She has very good legs,” he grunted, thumbing the bone in his underlip. “She outruns her guards with ease. But enough of the village girl. The fat-smith was unsuccessful?” He turned back to the grim-faced guides, smirking with satisfaction.

“We don’t know if he was successful or not,” Yahad snapped sourly, tossing her red head. “All we know is that he had not emerged after a full day within the burial. Perhaps he is on his way to us now.”

Shabael chuckled rockily. “Small chance that he will reach us, though, travelling on his own. It seems he has failed his trial.”

“It does not,” Yahad snarled back. Shabael blinked in surprise. “That fat-smith is far more Zainab than I ever could have thought. He outran me through the hills, you idiot Ashkhan. If he emerges alive from the wraithways, he will find his way back to us!” She punctuated her last three words with sharp jabs of the butt of her spear into the rocky ground. Then she spun around and stalked away, stiff backed.

“What in the name of the Ancestors was that?!” Shabael spluttered after a shocked silence. “What’s gotten into her?”

Derch and Kanly exchanged grim glances. The bigger mer tipped his head back toward the camp, and Kanly nodded wordlessly as he set traipsing off after Yahad. The wide-shouldered Ashlander stepped closer to the Ashkhan.

“I followed along with farce,” Derch growled lowly, scowling, “but it shamed me to do so. You have behaved shamefully. Your actions are disgraceful.”

Shabael’s pierced, tattooed face went black with blood. “Excuse me?” he grated coldly. “Speak up and explain, gulakhan. And – choose your words carefully, little Derch,” his dremora-face snarled. “Your Ashkhan thought he heard insults from your mouth, just now.”

“You won’t intimidate me into silence this time, Shabael,” the bigger mer growled right back. “I do nothing more than advise you, as is my duty as gulakhan. I bring you criticisms, not insults.”

“I have a Wise Woman for that,” the Ashkhan muttered darkly. “You are a guard and a companion.”

“And as your companion I will speak! Your judgement has been clouded, Shabael, by your passions. Your anger at the Wise Woman’s daughter blinds you to the fact that her fat-smith is a worthy mer, to the truth; that he would be a valuable addition to our tribe!”

“I gave him the chance the ancestors granted,” the Ashkhan answered mulishly. “He failed, as I knew he would. He cannot have the heart of a Zainab after living so long among the settled people.”

Derch shook his big head. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “I think you will be surprised, and I hope you will be accepting if you are. But that behavior is not what I would criticize. What I criticize is how you have behaved today.” His heavy brow contracted. “You brought the chandler’s once-fiancé here, tried to keep her here in case the fat-smith returned to us, just so that you could create strife between Maissel and Maela. You plotted to make the Wise Woman’s daughter reject her lover so that he would return willingly to his village, even if he had been successful in his trial. You plotted to foster chaos, and tragedy, and you plotted to subvert the will of the ancestors. You have shamed yourself.”

The Ashkhan quivered. His wide lips paled to a thin grey line. “You see more than you show, gulakhan,” he rasped. “But I have shamed no one. I follow the purpose-principle of Boethiah; it is you who subverts the ancestors. The point is moot, though,” he barked over Derch’s protests. “The fat-smith has failed. He has not returned. His trial is done. Keep your silence, subordinate one,” he snarled as the mer once more tried to speak, “at least until this evening. I will call on your testimony of the journey, then, and announce the chandler’s failure. Now – begone.”

And gone the gulakhan was, sent stamping grouchily back down to the camp proper as the Ashkhan went stalking beneath the khanumbra. There he stayed, alone, pacing furiously around the fire pit at the center of the circle of his gulakhan’s yurts, brooding and stewing on the beefy mer’s words, as the sun fell through the grey skies through the long afternoon, and then away behind Red Mountain’s crest. He brooded, and boiled, and churned with the bilious bite of the criticism he knew in his heart to be well-founded and just. Dusk swept up from the waves in the east, from the quiescence of the falling tide in the Inner Sea and Zafirbel Bay, sneaking and swirling and creeping up the shores and the rocky hill, between the yurts, to peek in at the heart of the Zainab. It saw them there in their innocent domesticity, and giggled to itself; it saw the fat-smith’s three guides talking lowly amongst themselves at the edge of the yurts, neglecting their guard duties, and it chortled; it saw sweet marble-armed Maela lugging her lush, swollen body about in stubborn industry and resolute faith, and it giggled; it watched the ancestor-anointed Ashkhan pacing alone and preoccupied above the rest of the camp, and it cackled in silence. The sunset flamed in the west, and the shadows of the land stretched back to the east; the last rays of day smote the Zainab on their high promontory, and sent their shadows slinking back down to the dark, salted waves.

Womer came to the grim Ashkhan in the dark, and fire bloomed beneath the khanumbra in livid, red-gold petals. Shabael stopped his pacing, then, and stood off to the side, watching in absent sourness as the womer spitted a haunch of nix for him above the flames. He caught one’s elbow after a moment, and whispered a terse command. She nodded, and vanished away down to the rest of the camp. The Ashkhan seated himself cross-legged before the fire, eased somewhat in conscience, and awaited his dinner and the gathering that would follow. His people began stepping up to the harsh glow of his lonely fire before he had devoured in its entirety the tough muscle from within the nix’s roasted exoskeletal femur, but he tossed it aside nonetheless; food was not what was wanted to ease him, that night. He sat back, lounging on his elbows and staring broodingly into the flames, as the Zainab assembled in ones and twos before him, as his gulakhans took their respective seats before their yurts – except Derch, who pointedly kept back in the encircling crowd – and as his Wise Woman appeared, leading gravid Maela with a helping arm up the rocks. He stayed silent, and still, until the daughter had been seated comfortably off to the side of the fire and the mother had fixed him with her characteristic expectant stare. Then he began.

“By now,” he growled, loud but slow, “you all of you know that those warriors who left us to guide the fat-smith Maissel Sarethi on his journey to the ancestors have returned. They have returned alone.” He glanced up once, briefly, and Maela’s stony eyes met his over the flames. “The fat-smith has failed,” he went on, gritting his teeth, “and has been punished by the ancestors.” There was a stir in the crowd as the chandler’s guides grumbled, but Shabael held up a broad hand calmly. “Please,” he growled, “I am not done. I will address your concerns. I have learned, of late, that some among you have become dissatisfied with how I have handled this… situation. You believe that I have allowed my own emotions to cloud my judgement, that I treated this lost son of the Zainab too harshly. For harsh I have been!” His gravelly voice cracked in the rapt stillness. “And harsh I intended to be. This mer, this Maissel – he has lived a soft life, behind the cowards’ walls of that village down there, but our lives are anything but soft. We roam the hills, we face the beasts, we meet the Salt-Mouths in battle. And we are strong for it! If this villager were to join us he must be as strong as we! He must be able to face the simple trials of our daily lives! If he cannot withstand the harshness I bring to bear, then he will never be able to face the harshness of the land or the ferocity of the Ahemmusa. He will crumble before the simple trials of our daily lives.”

“So let me be clear,” he called out, on his feet and staring forcefully around at his people, the people wrapped up and ensorcelled by the words that flowed out over his long tongue and the baculum that pierced it, “by opposing his suit so strenuously, I am this mer’s greatest proponent! I am he who tests him, who shows him the core of our lives! I do this, my people, though I feel in my bones that his heart is not that of a true Velothi. I am your Ashkhan, and I know my people. And I do not feel this fat-smith as one of us, whatever his blood, but I let him be tested! I let him try himself against my disdain and against that of the Ancestors, instead of turning him softly, disrespectfully aside, back to his people! I held the knife to his throat! I spit in his face! I tested his strength! Of all of you, only I respected him enough to test him!” He paused, narrow face swiveling slowly back and forth, meeting the eyes of each member of his tribe. “I told you,” he went on more quietly, “that the fat-smith has failed in his quest. I know this, in my bones, because I know that his heart is not true. Yahad has informed me that I may be wrong. She and the two gulakhans who accompanied her with the fat-smith believe there is still a chance that my great-uncle could succeed, that he could emerge from the tomb and make his way to us here. My apologies, Maela,” he grated, watching the scowling girl before him, “but it is not true. No settled mer could make his way successfully across the Grazelands in winter, even if he did emerge from the wraithways by some fluke. Your lover has failed.”

She smiled grimly up at her Ashkhan. “You just can’t grasp it, can you Shabael?” she whispered fiercely. “He isn’t a settled mer. He is Velothi. He has traveled through these lands longer than you have lived. He knows more of the wilderness than any of us here. He is the son of Kaushad, and grandson of Uroshnor. He will prevail.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Shabael replied smoothly. “Perhaps she is right! Perhaps I am wrong, and this fat-smith is one of us! It is not likely. But I tell you, my people, if that is the case, I will be the first to welcome him to our fires, for I would never turn away one of our both our blood and of our soul. And for those who doubt… I challenge you! I challenge you to bring him before me. I will prove that my actions have always been for the good of the tribe.”

Silence answered him as his people nodded to each other, impressed with his magnanimity. Derch and Kanly exchanged dubious looks, and Harah snorted quietly behind the Ashkhan, but for the most part the Zainab seemed to accept him at his word. He stood before the fire, wide hands on narrow hips, face harshly contrasted from the dying flames below, and surveyed in satisfaction his rhetoric-rigged tribe. Boethiah was certainly with him, that night. Then a single harsh voice rose up from the back of the crowd, and the pleased grin froze on his lips.

“Challenge accepted, Shabael al-Kaushad!”

A ripple ran through the crowd, a ripple of shocked whispers and frantic searchings. Shabael’s features clenched around his piercings of bone in tight, confused wrinkles. Then a hush fell like a sheet over the tribe, and the crowd split slowly aside in a line away from the khanumbra. And there was Maissel, grey-haired and grooved as ever, thin and straight in his tight Ashlander vest and trousers, a pack over his shoulder and a small cloth-wrapped bundle in his huge hands.

“I accept your challenge,” he grated into the silence. “And I will have your welcome.” He stared, stoic and stone-faced, up at the Ashkhan. The crowd was riveted, heads swiveling back and forth between the chandler and the grand-nephew who glared down at him, fists clenched at his sides, his face a mask of furiously trembles muscle. The wind whistled faintly, the fire popped, but Shabael said nothing; just stared, his face back with rage.

At last Maela spoke up in front of him, where she had scrambled joyously to her feet at Maissel’s voice. “Do it, Ashkhan,” she said without looking at him, without turning her dimpled beaming smile away from her mer. “Do it, or I will, and you will have broken your word.”

Another long moment passed. Then his lips twitched, jerked, and ejaculated hated, reluctant words.

“Be – welcome, to my fire,” he growled haltingly. “Come and show us – the proof of your success, and I – will welcome you to the tribe, as well.”

“The proof is here,” Maissel replied, hefting the bundle in his hands. “The suet of Kaushad Fruitful [censored]; my father. But the trial requires more than proof, Ashkhan; the ancestors have demanded that I demonstrate to you that which I learned whilst amongst them. So seat yourself, nephew, and let all gather close, and you will see that which has not been seen amongst the living for centuries. I will summon the spirits before you, and I will do so by the ancient ways of the Zainab fat-smiths.”

They goggled at him in amazement, even Maela blinking in surprise at his blunt confidence. Who among them could speak so calmly of retrieving ancestor-artifacts? Who would not falter at suggesting a summoning of any kind? The ancestors were honored, treasured, respected, but they were feared, as well. So they stared, amazed, shaken by his simple confidence. Then bluff, beefy Derch stepped forward, and a high, ululating cry rang out from his thick throat. The cold air reverberated with his sole song. And then others took it up, and the winds resounded with the calls of the Velothi, with their vociferocity, with their wordless acclaim, and Maissel climbed the short slope. He rose up; up amidst his people’s praise; up, to his snarling nephew; up, to his glowing lover; and up, at last, to his new life.

I really enjoyed this. It makes me want to play Morrowind. Don't be a stranger to these forums, or at least keep us updated with any links to your writing. I can't even offer you any constructive criticism. You used a cliche once that seemed trite, and a one-sentence paragraph that seemed beneath you, but that's all I can think of. Nothing wrong with your word-count, to me. The chapter-length is also fine. Forget the tl;dr crowd.

Thanks for the hard work. Also, if this was the end, I think this story deserves an epilogue!

Hey, glad you enjoyed it! I've got... two more chapters, and an epilogue coming. Then it's done - but the next project is bubbling.

Could you point me to the cliche and one-sentencer, if you remember where they were/how they were phrased? [censored] gotta be eliminated.

Chapter XXI

“I knew you would do it,” Maela said quietly as Maissel drew up before her. She beamed up at him, plump cheeks dimpled deeply, lips glistening, red eyes glowing, smooth arms gleaming in the fire light. “But you kept me waiting, fat-smith.” She crossed her arms playfully across the scarf covering her babe-buxom bosom.

“Not too long, I hope,” answered Maissel easily. “You haven’t delayed the delivery on my account, have you? I would not want to have held that up by my tardiness!”

The girl bit her lip, grinning, and shook her head. “Not quite time for that, I think,” she said. “Be patient! You’d think that a grizzled old mer like you would have learned that skill by now.”

The chandler shrugged. “We learn it slowly when we live without womer to make it a necessity.” His broad lips grinned. “But perhaps you will take it upon yourself to teach me.”

“I most certainly, certainly will, Maissel,” Maela breathed softly, radiantly. There was a long moment of stares, of arrested breath, of uncertain oscillation, of stomach fluttering apprehension! – and then Maissel’s broad palm was cupping her jaw and his dark lips were kissing her, sublimely senseless of the boldness of it, of the impropriety of it, unhindered and heedless of the tribe watching and the cries that rose anew from the throats of their people.

“Unless you wish to play out more of Boethiah’s pillow secrets for us,” the Ashkhan grated sourly when they had separated, “perhaps we could begin. You have the suet of Kaushad Fruitful [censored], fat-smith?”

“I do,” replied Maissel, looking up from Maela’s sweet face. He stepped closer to the fire and to the Ashkhan across it, drawing Maela with him with the large hand settled in the small of her back. With the other, he lifted the cloth-wrapped package. “It was no easy matter,” he said, meeting Harah’s eyes where she stood a short distance from the Ashkhan, “but while I was in the halls of the ancestors, I was able both to retrieve my father’s fat and to learn how I can use it to summon his spirit, in the ways of the ancient fat-smiths.”

“Indeed?” said Shabael flatly as Harah’s lips curled in a tight, satisfied smile. “Impressive, fat-smith. Perha-“

“It is impressive,” the Wise Woman broke in, shooting Shabael a cool glance for his tone. “I would be most pleased to hear the tale of your trial, Maissel.”

The chandler grunted, shaking his head. “I would be pleased to tell you,” he grated, “but another time, perhaps. I am anxious to prove to you my accomplishments, as I am sure my hospitable nephew is as well.”

Shabael scowled down at the flames, and Harah nodded in understanding. “Of course,” she said. “It is good that the ancestors’ injunctions be carried out with all speed. Tell us, what do you require for your work?”

“Little enough,” he replied. “This fire. A metal pot. Two small clay urns. A stick for stirring.”

“Simple needs, indeed,” the Wise Woman agreed. She clapped her hands smartly. “Zainab! See to this mer’s requests!”

Several bulky-skirted womer scattered from the crowd, down to the camp proper to find the necessary tools. The rest drew closer in beneath the flame lit circle under the khanumbra as Maissel helped Maela to a seat beside Derch, who had at last taken his position with the other gulakhans encircling the flames. Then he stood, waiting, cross-armed and stoic, ignoring Shabael’s sullen glares and the Zainab’s curious stares. One by one the items he had requested were deposited on the layered rugs before him, laid with careful, almost nervous awe at his feet; at the feet of the strange settled one turned Ashlander without warning; at the feet of their ancestral hero’s long lost progeny; at the feet of the suddenly otherworldly fat-smith who claimed he could manifest their ancestors with fat as his medium.

He unfolded his arms when everything had been assembled and the tribesmer had resumed their places in the close ring before the khanumbra, and crouched down on his heels.

“You all know that I use fat in my craft,” he grated loudly, looking down at the bundle in his hands. “But I doubt that you know for what. There are many uses for it, but one of the most important – in my life up to now, at least – is in the making of candles. The Zainab use mostly oil lamps and lanterns, I know, but the people of Vos use only candles. This one thing is so important to them that it dominated their perceptions of me above all the other goods I provided to them. To you, I am a fat-smith, but to them – I was the chandler.” He paused, and slowly undid the wrappings in his hands. The hard, lumpy lard shone ruddily in the fire light. “This is the suet of Kaushad,” he said lowly. “This is the fat of his loins. And with it, I will make my first act as your fat-smith; my last as a chandler. I will make you a candle that burns unto the ancestors.”

The suet slid from his hands, to thud into the cast iron pot before him. He stood, and lifted the pot to hang from the spit above the licking flames. The Zainab watched, hushed, awed, reverent, their faces rapt and peering in the fire’s harsh illumination. Maela’s mouth hung slightly open; she looked on with shining eyes, her legs tucked beneath her and her awkward child-hands folded on her swollen belly. Her mother stared, proud and fierce, crag faced in the shadows, and the encircling gulakhans goggled, wide-eyed. Even Shabael was only stony, not sullen; his narrow dremora-face kept statuesque vigil. Something had descended on the tribe when Maissel had shown them the fat and thrown it into the pot, some communal consciousness, and it held them in interconnected silence that only grew more powerful as the chandler worked. He took up the hollow racer bone stir-stick they had brought him, swirling the melting fat, and a pulse seemed to jerk beneath the earth; their heartbeats synchronized. The yellow-white suet popped and sizzled as it was impregnated with flame, with soul, and the cold night air seemed to sigh with presence; their lungs were filled with a strange transmaterial cohabitation. The scum of clear grease bubbled to the top in the pot, and their bones thrummed with the warmth of indwelling.

And Maissel was the focal point of that otherworldly uprising; Maissel the chandler, the fat-smith, the narrow figure cast blackly against the flames over which he bent, stirring the fat of his father and rousing that mer’s spirit to the forge of his heart. He prayed, as he had prayed to his mother before the ancestors’ fire, and smelted his father’s willing spirit unto the liquid fat boiling before him. Then his broad Dunmer hands were on the hot black metal, and with another prayer of thanks, he lifted the pot from the flames. He poured the grease off the surface, into the first of the two urns; that, he did not need for this candle. But before he poured the more viscous rendered tallow into the second urn, he removed something small and wispy from his belt pouch, laid it carefully against the clay rim; three long strands of fiber, of his mother’s hair, twisted upon each other to stand straight. The white fat oozed down over the rim of black metal, around that ancestral wick, and settled in the urn, turgid and smooth.

Maissel set the empty pot aside. This was the part he had never done; the cooling. His fat-smith spirit guide had done that, before. He did not know what he would do… and yet he was not worried. Something filled him with confidence. His father filled him with strength. His eyes closed; he cupped the urn’s warm sides in his palms, bowed his head, and did the only thing that seemed to fit with the wordless murmurs of his soul. He spit on the hot tallow.

A great hiss of steam rose up from the urn as the water of his body hit it, and for a moment Maissel thought he had erred grievously. But then it cleared, and he was staring down at hard, opaque wax in the urn’s iris. The ancestors had accepted his part in the crafting; the candle was quenched. He raised it above his head in trembling hands.

“It is complete!” he shouted, voice ringing in the rapt quiet. “The conduit of the ancestors, fueled by my father’s flesh.” He fell silent, staring up at the candle in his hands, awed.

The Wise Woman spoke up after a long moment, hesitant and unsure. “Is it… may we burn it, Maissel? Is that how the ancestors may be called through it?”

“Yes,” the fat-smith grated back slowly. “Yes. Douse the flames!” he barked, gesturing at the fire. “Douse the flames, and we will see by the light of the spirit.”

Water was brought from the well below, in bucket and urn, cast fiercely onto the flames; steam roiled and roared upward, beyond the edges of the khanumbra cover and into the night, screaming defiance and fury; the air stank of sodden sulfur. It took quite a bit of water, but in the end the flames were extinguished, beaten down to wet ashes mixed with still smoldering coals, and darkness overtook the tribe. In that blackness, Maissel stepped forward, into the steaming fire pit, and nestled his urn-held candle upright in the ash. He stepped back, and seated himself cross-legged beside Maela, the third point of a triangle of Ashkhan, Wise Woman, and fat-smith.

“Harah,” he growled into the gloom. “You must start this. And you, Ashkhan, you must follow her lead. Reach for the ancestors. Beseech them to come among us. Light the candle, and bring forward Kaushad the Fruitful. Begin, Wise Woman.”

There was a long, uncertain pause as Maela’s mother hesitated, unseen, uncertain, unsure of this new ritual. Then, “I call on you, Kaushad the Fruitful!” her voice rang out. “I, Harah, Wise Woman of the Zainab, call you forth! Light with your spirit this candle we have prepared with your flesh, and bring us your voice!”

The Ashkhan’s voice picked up smoothly after her, his talented tongue not missing a beat. “I call on you, Kaushad,” his deep voice grated, “I, Shabael al-Kaushad, ancestor-anointed, Ashkhan of the Zainab, and your grandson – I call upon you. Speak to me, honored grandfather.”

“And I call upon you, my father,” Maissel finished. “I, your son, long lost and now reclaimed. As fat-smith of the Zainab, I call you before us through the vessel I have prepared with your flesh. Speak to us.”

And in the blackness a light was born. The fat of Kaushad’s loins leapt up the twining wick of his lover’s hair, and the candle kindled; a tiny, sparkling flare, at first, and then suddenly it blazed before them, a miniscule flame so intensely bright that it flooded the night with light, so concentrated that its effulgence could not be faced. It paled their faces, washed all color from the scene. And then it spoke.

“So my firstborn has found his way home at last,” Kaushad’s voice echoed from the blazing flame to the cowering Dunmer, and sounding surprisingly near and fleshly for a ghost so gloriously manifested. “And he has done me proud.”

“My thanks, father!” grated Maissel shakily, squinting at the pinpointing effulgence. “I have done my best to prove myself to our people.”

“Prove yourself you have, son,” the dead Ashkhan spake. “You have proven yourself most worthy of my blood. Look upon him, my people, my Zainab!” he roared suddenly. “Look upon this mer before you! This is my son! I, Kaushad, name him my firstborn! And I, Kaushad, confess to my people his lineage! Born of Ghanimah he was, born of my conquest, of my capture… born of the only enslaver of my heart. I took her in raid, as booty, when I was still young, when I was still young and unused to a womer’s touch. I kept her as my flesh-toy in the long months of the ransoming, and in that time she both warmed to my touch and conquered my heart. I planted within her this son. I tell you this, my people, in confession, but without shame, for Ghanimah was a womer worthy of the blood of the Zainab if ever there was one; she was a fighter, fierce and indomitable despite her bonds. My only shame in her has been that I was not more stalwart in my faith; I let her go.”

“I lost her,” the spirit intoned to the shocked listeners, “I lost her to her husband. The mer paid her ransom; the deal was done; and my father, honored Uroshnor, forced me to return her, against my will. So I tell you, my people: do not remember me as Fruitful [censored]. That appellation has been the greatest shame and bitterest irony of my life and death. I shamed myself, with the actions that gained your praise; I spit upon the womer I sired sons on, for in their arms I sought only Ghanimah. So remember me no longer for my shame.”

“Punishment enough that my son, my firstborn, was raised by my rival!” the spirit went on. “Far and above punishment enough. And yet… and yet he has still proven himself to be my son. He has eased the Wrathful Cuckold, made our spirit hold peaceful once more, and he has returned his mother at last to my arms. So I tell you, my people that he is truly my son, and truly Zainab. Welcome him to your side.”

“Welcome.” The shocked murmur ran around the crowd after a short pause, and, “Welcome, fat-smith!” came the gruff barks of the gulakhans, led by Derch. Maela leaned over to whisper in his ear. “Welcome to your people, Maissel.” And she kissed him softly in the white blaze.
“The exorcist of the Cuckold is surely welcome among us,” the Wise Woman’s voice rang out, unseen from the other side of the light, “as welcome as your lost firstborn, spirit. Have you any other words, honored Kaushad?”

“No,” the light echoed. “By the strength of my son’s conduit, I have at last made my confession before my people, at last purged my shame before my love. I leave him to you, and return to his mother’s arms at last…” The flame’s brilliance began to dim.

“Wait!” barked the fat-smith hurriedly. “Hold, father!”

The candle flared again. “Yes, fat-smith?”

“When I was in the tomb of the Zainab,” Maissel grated hurriedly, “a spirit spoke for me. One of the ancient Velothi fat-smiths. She guided me, and taught me her ways. Only with her help was I able to succeed, and I did not have the opportunity to thank her or even ask her name. Would you send that spirit before us, so that I could thank her properly?”

A long pause. Then, “If she consents, I will send her to you,” Kaushad’s deep voice agreed. “Farewell, son. Farewell, Wise Woman. Farewell, Ashkhan. Farewell, my people!” And the spirit of Kaushad, Kaushad Lost-Love, Kaushad Hole-Heart, anon Kaushad Newly Healed, dwindled to a tiny spark, a pinpoint of orange. The khanumbra was dark once more as the tribe waited, as Maissel’s heart thudded anxiously in his chest. Would she come?

At last, slowly, the light returned to its blazing effulgence, to the peak that flooded the night with brilliance and paled their ashen Dunmeri faces unto whiteness. But no words issued forth; the ghost-flame pulsed in silence.

“Spirit?” began Maissel hesitantly. “Do you hear? Is the conduit unsatisfactory?”

“I hear well,” a soft female voice answered. She was far more distant than Kaushad had been, far less omnipresent. “You have prepared a fine vessel. To hear, to feel, to speak, is easeful. Your fat-smithery brings me closer to flesh than I had ever thought to expect. I am… healed, by your craft. The soft death cessates. You are very skilled, fat-smith.”

Maissel swallowed nervously. “My thanks, spirit,” he said. “And that is why I have called you forth; to give thanks, thanks for your assistance and teaching. You have enabled me to join my love, my child, and my people, and for that I owe you everything.”

“I could have done nothing else,” the spirit echoed, “but still, it was done with pleasure. You are a good student, fat-smith.”

He grinned, gaining confidence. “Again, my thanks. Might I know the name of my honored teacher?”

Silence. The light flickered strangely, casting boiling shadows over the faces of the Ashlanders, but the ghost made no reply.

“Spirit?” the fat-smith grated worriedly. “Why do you hesitate?”

The light eased, smoothing up to its grand brilliance slowly, reluctantly, accompanied by a long whisper that could only be a sigh.

“I hesitate, fat-smith,” the spirit’s soft voice answered at last, “because I am not so fond of confessions as Kaushad… as my son. But very well. You wish to know the name I bore in life?” she echoed. “Fine. Confession it is, it seems. Know my name; I was/am/will be ELNET SARETHI.”

A confused murmur of only mild perturbation ran around the crowd at the ghost’s harsh hiss, but Maissel’s eyes were bulging; his breath seized up in his chest. Maela rubbed his arm in concern, but he could only stare into the light, dumbstruck.

“You – you are –“ he rasped out after a long silence. “You were the wife of Gare Sarethi? He that was the chandler of Vos, and the mer I once believed was my grandfather?” And at that, the import hit the rest of the tribe; gasps erupted like pimples.

The spirit laughed, and the sound had edges in it. “Gare was only as much as I made him, when it came to smithing,” she said. “I was the fat-smith of the Zainab, not Gare. What he learned of the craft and used for the villagers was what I taught him.”

“But – but how can this be?” choked out the Wise Woman in shock. “How did this come about, spirit?”

“It came about because I was a young lovestruck fool who did not realize her own influence,” Elnet answered bitterly. “And, oh, how I have dreaded and longed for that admission. And still it stings, for that love has not yet faded in the soft death’s acidic rasp. You want the whole sordid tale, though,” she sighed. “Well, I will not deny you. My shame has been shown. See it in all its glorious folly. I was indeed the wife of a settled mer, of Gare Sarethi, despite that I was born of this tribe,” she began, “but before that… before that I was the wife of the Ashkhan. I was the wife of Uroshnor.”

Scandalized gasps and whispers frothed in the crowd; Muiri’s ancient face stood out starkly in front, her wrinkled mouth stretched wide and gaping, her hands clasped tightly, eagerly, to her briast. She leaned forward, mesmerized.

“Gare and Uroshnor were… spear-brothers,” Elnet continued slowly, “in all senses of the words. They met by chance when both were grown, when Uroshnor was already Ashkhan, and against all odds, befriended each other. Gare was made clanfriend, with Uroshnor’s help, and the two became inseparable. They did everything together. Gare was the silent partner in all of Uroshnor’s adventures, the invisible companion you have erased from your legends. He was there with my husband for the heist of Nchuleft; he incited the dunking dare of the Ahemmusa; he helped saw the mushroom node from Tel Fyr and pilot it back across the waves. They did everything together.”

“Including,” she went on quietly, echoingly, “well, including me. Uroshnor was not a jealous mer, mostly, and he loved Gare like a brother. Perhaps more than a brother. We had an… arrangement. When Gare was in the camp, I shared my blankets with two mer, not one.” The crowd was deathly still, riveted. Muiri’s eyes glittered ecstatically, and her wrinkled underlip was caught tight between her teeth.

“And we were very happy for a time,” the spirit said wistfully. “I had my craft, and my first son, Kaushad, from before Gare joined us, to occupy me while my mer were away on adventure. We had our nights, when they were with the camp… oh, what nights we had. The Zainab were strong, then; there was plenty for all. It was a happy time.”

“But things changed. We changed. Perhaps it was only I that changed, and that was enough to upset the balance. I fell in love with Gare. I loved Uroshnor too, of course, but Gare was new, and different, and I could not get enough of him. Oh, I know that I would have – for I did – with time, and perhaps if I had had time I would have come to love both equally, and all would have been beauty and ease. But I did not have time. I had a babe.”

“I became pregnant again, and as a womer does I knew to whom my womb had warmed; Gare, not Uroshnor. This, too, might have led to naught ill… had I not been such a fool. I told him of the child. I told Gare it was he who had sired it upon me. I don’t know what I expected. That he would offer to live with us permanently, perhaps? Truly foolish; he did not. Instead, he asked me to live with him, away from the tribe, away from Uroshnor. And in the rush of my infatuation, I accepted. I left my husband, and in the villagers’ chapel became twofold a wife.”

“But what I am truly confessing to you,” the spirit whispered on after a long, pregnant silence, “is that it was my sin that brought on these hard times for the Zainab. I took the craft of the fat-smith away from our people, and betrayed its secrets to the settled folk. I abandoned my Ashkhan, my husband, and in so doing shattered both of the loves of his life. I destroyed his will, and smoothed the way for an Ahemmusa youth to destroy his doom-seeking flesh. It was my actions, my follies that laid the Zainab low from our ancient strength.”

The Ashlanders stared in deathly silence at the pinpoint blaze of the ancestral candle in its steaming bed of ashes. Their faces were grim, unforgiving, judgemental; black as the night behind them despite the brilliance before.

The spirit sighed again; the candle’s beacon flickered. “In a sense,” she went on, “I have been the ultimate sower of sorrow. My actions destroyed the lives and afterlives of my husband, of my tribe, and of my children. Aravel grew up completely unaware of his Velothi heritage; I did not even speak of our people before him, by Gare’s request. Kaushad, my firstborn, I think must have been similarly ignorant of his mother and brother in Vos. No doubt Uroshnor forbid the topic. Ah… and what agony it was, to watch my daughter, Ghanimah, when she returned at last from her long imprisonment, married to one of my sons, in love with the other. But, fat-smith,” she added, voice lightening, “you, you, my twice-seeded grandson, sired by son and son – you have made the amends of your grandmother. In you, the craft has come full circle; back to the Zainab. You have undone the woes I wrought; you brought both my and my daughter’s restitutions to the spirits of our husbands, and at last eased their rest. It is you who should be thanked, and most deeply indeed.”

“If I have done it,” Maissel grated, blinking past tears, “it was only with my grandmother’s help. Thank you, Elnet. Thank you.”

“I could do nothing else, twice-sired grandson,” she answered softly. “I could do nothing else. And it is done… the wrongs made right… the unknown made known… and now… now I may at last quit my ghostly quarantine… goodbye, grandson… thank you… and may you find all that you seek…” The candle dwindled down to a dark pinprick… and with a tiny pop, guttered into blackness.

They sat there in that dark, cold stillness for a long, long time, stewing in the revelations of their peoples’ history. They waited in darkness, in gloom, united in the struggle for understanding. Then a voice spoke up; a womer, young and bright.

“It was a curse!” Yahad said wonderingly. “A curse upon the Zainab stole our strength!”

“The curse has been lifted,” Derch added, grating voice filled with awe. “The curse has been lifted!”

“The curse has been lifted!” another voice echoed. “The Zainab are restored!” The cry spread, in wondering whispers and joyous shouts through the night. “The curse has been lifted!” A hand seized Maissel’s shoulder suddenly, and Kanly dragged him to his feet.

“The fat-smith did it!” he shouted, jerking Maissel’s arm into the air. “The twice-sired son has blessed our people! He has lifted the curse of his grandmother’s sin!”

And the tribe roared back in fierce joy, shouting Maissel’s name, screaming their praises to their fat-smith, rushing forward to hug him, to kiss him, to pummel him with acclaim in the dark.

“This calls for a celebration!” a voice rose suddenly above the hubbub. “A feast!” someone else yelled, and the tribe flurried into activity around the fat-smith and the plump girl who clung possessively to his arm and grinned fit to split her plump cheeks. They scattered down to the storage yurts to fetch kegs of mazte and hunks of cured guar meat, poles of dried marshmerrow and ash-skinned yams; the fire was rekindled beneath the khanumbra, and its golden glow boiled once more on the tribes rejoicing faces; on Harah, bright eyed and beaming as she swept up her skirts and stepped into the dance ringing and swirling around the fire; on Derch, white teeth gleaming in an impossibly wide grin; on Yahad’s fierce joyous smile and equally fierce copper hair as she leaped and bounced around the flames with Harah and the other dancers; on Maela, softly smiling and pressed close to Maissel’s side; on Maissel himself, and his awestruck mouth; and on Shabael, the foiled Ashkhan, as he sat stolid and pop-eyed, staring past the dancers and into the flames.

“Now, don’t take it so hard, Ashkhan!” chided Derch cheerfully as he shoved a jug of warm mazte into the mer’s wide hands. “Have a drink! And remember that it was Kaushad’s firstborn son who conquested where you could not. There’s no shame in that!”

A tiny frown wrinkled the mer’s brow. His hands tightened around the warm jug. Then he looked up, and his eyes were miraculously soft, incredibly surprised.

“I never thought of it like that,” he murmured. “But – well, you’re right! No shame in losing to Kaushad; no shame in losing to his firstborn! Come on, fat-smith, let’s put the past aside! Sit with me, honored uncle, and by the ancestors we’ll get down as much of this liquor as any two mer ever have in one sitting!”

So Maissel took his seat by his grand-nephew, and the two guzzled warm alcohol in earnest, awkward good will, as the heat of the bonfire washed over them and the shadows of the swirling, contorting, hip-twitching-chest-popping dancers flickered past, as the shouts and cries of long repressed merriment rang out over quiet Vos and its dark chapel in drunken shouts and song, as the Zainab rejoiced in their delivery. And it wasn’t long at all before the mazte had flushed their skins hot and heartfelt, and the two rivals grated out horrid Dunmeri drinking chants arm in arm, conducting the dancers before them, sober Maela giddy and giggling under Maissel’s other arm. The flames whirled, the dancers swirled, the night curled, and bit by bit it all blurred together, spinning, grinning, twinning, the Zainab were winning! at last at long last… and one by one the joyous tribesmer collapsed in the watchful night, slumped down in their yurts in piles of flesh and cloth, strewed themselves along the cold, frozen dead grass, and cuddled together before glowing coals.

Chapter XXII

The tide’s yawn had slowed. The waters lay cold, lapping, poised in the bed of the bay, prickled with weathered andesite spires and a thousand islands, large and small, where mudcrabs clicked and clacked through the kresh and contorted mushroom towers spewed their spores, where racers nested amidst crag and cranny and booted feet pounded a steady shuffling rhythm into the sands of the beach. The hyphae of dawn crept over the tips of the Mephalain Mountains of mainland Morrowind in the east. The world was quiet; the tide was low. Vos’ streets waited, empty save for the thin winter mist and the slinking frost, its villagers still safe-slumbering in their warm beds. All but Chana, all but the desperate should-have-been, would-have-been bride choking on her empty soul in the vacant chapel, all but the abandoned piece of booty begging in the hall of the Triunes for their Anticipations to send wind and flame to ignite her, flesh and soul, to burn her away like the rest of her wedding. She screamed out the hungers of her stolen dreams, the voracity of the voids in her heart, but her pain was silent, her distress sub-audible in its radiation. The world was quiet; the tide was low. And on the rocky heights above Vos, above its shores and sandy paddies, above its low promontory and stonemold walls, the bare ground was strewn with debauched Ashlanders, with unconscious Velothi in various states of undress, piled together in warmth and communion around the remains of their celebratory fires, collapsed at last in weary exultation. Only a few, here and there, picked about over the sparse frosted grass amidst the wreckage of revelry, blearily peering about the pre-dawn, down at the still village, down at the thudding sands in the bay. The world was quiet; the tide was low. But the inexorable pull of moon and mind, of pounding heart-foot-throat rhythm over the waters, of ritualized respect, strummed hard and fast at the ocean’s slumber, and soon… soon the tide would rise.

The quiet was broken first.

“Aiiiiiiieeeeee!”

The shrill cry drifted in the distance. Maissel groaned, and wriggled, but a pressure on his neck pulled him back down to the soft something pillowing his head. He faded back into sleep.

“Aiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

The second call seemed to blast through his ears, to shake his skull like a rattling rolling boulder. He sat up sharply, groaning and squinting his grainy eyes against a grey brilliance that pierced like needles. His head felt packed with wool.

“Wake the Ashkhan!” a voice shouted. “Out spears, and wake the Ashkhan!”

“Wha – wha’ is it?” a voice moaned from beside the fat-smith. “Who wantsh me?”

Something large and dark came between Maissel and the light. “Wake up, Shabael!” Derch’s gritty voice sawed through his head. “All of you, wake up! Battle is nigh!”

For that, the fat-smith pried open his eyes. He sat atop the layered rugs before the cold ashes of the Ashkhan’s fire, Maela curled up beneath a rough blanket on one side and groggy Shabael getting to his feet on the other. Cold grey twinklings of dawn shone between the yurts to the east; morning threatened.

“Battle?” Shabael said thickly, stumbling and holding his head between his hands. “What battle? Who said anything about a battle?”

“You expect them to warn us?” growled Derch mercilessly. “The Ahemmusa do not warn! They do not wait! And they do not give mercy, so wake UP!!”

For a long second Shabael stared at his gulakhan, face scrunched in comical confusion, eyes squinted and blurry. Then he spoke, in low consternation. “I think… I may still be drunk,” he posited, “because none of that made sense. You might consider slapping –“

Derch’s two quick blows jerked the Ashkhan’s head from side to side. He blinked for a few moments, tonguing his teeth, and when he looked back to the impatient warrior, his eyes were clear.

“Thank you,” he grated, focusing. “Now tell me what’s going on. The Salt-Mouths are attacking? In what numbers?”

“They’re not attackin’ yet, but they will be soon. With everything they’ve got; it looks like they’re mustering every able body.”

“Every able body?” Shabael mouthed. His lips went grim and hard. “Show me,” he commanded. “And wake up the rest of the camp. Show me.”

“Down here,” Derch replied, hurrying away down the slope. “They’ve gathered on one of the islands just off shore.” Shabael strode purposefully off after him, bare, muscular back stiff and tense, black hair wildly spiked from sleep. Maissel scrambled to his feet to follow, and Maela caught at his arm. “What’s wrong?” she said sleepily. “Where are you going?”

“Stay here,” he answered in a rush, “the Ahemmusa are raiding. We must make preparations.”

“The Ahemmusa!” she gasped as he ran off after his nephew into the grey dawn. “Well – [censored]!”

“We’ve got a little time still,” Derch was explaining gravely as Maissel caught up to where he and the Ashkhan stood on a protruding point of stone overlooking the village below and the sea beyond. The horizon was purpling above the cliffs on the other side of the Inner Sea. “You see, they’re still occupied with their gill-gathering.” Derch’s arm swept out, and led the fat-smith’s eyes to an island far below, where a great mass of tiny, pale-armored figures danced and shuffled in cold shadow across the beach, bodies jerking, twitching to some inaudible rhythm, tugging at the sea with invisible soul fibers.

“Gill-gathering?” the fat-smith said breathlessly from silent Shabael’s side. “What do you mean?”

“Their battle ritual,” Derch answered grimly. “The magic they work before a raid to gain the favor of their ancestors and of the tide. Lets them breathe the waves. I know no more than that; the ways of the Ahemmusa are strange and secretive.”

“There are too many,” the Ashkhan muttered darkly. “Too many for a simple raid. How many rings do you think that is?” He gestured down to the tiny encircled dancers below.

Derch shrugged. “Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Too far to be sure.”

Shabael grunted. “Fifteen or twenty; either one is too many. Those aren’t foolish young raiders down there, out to steal our guar and prove themselves; those warriors, and all they have, it looks like; womer and mer both. Every able body, just like you said.”

“We’ve gotten away with too much,” Derch growled.

Shabael nodded as he stared past him, down at the readying warriors. “Two years we escaped them without battle or tribute,” he said. “They’re not happy with that. They mean to make us pay, now that they know we’re here and can’t escape. They mean to take everything we have.” His jaw flexed. “And I don’t know how to stop them,” he rasped quietly. Maissel shivered. They stood there a moment longer, staring grimly in the pre-dawn glimmer.

Then the bare chested Ashkhan roused himself. “Well, we will not run or die without a fight,” he growled. “Derch, prepare the Zainab for battle! And then gather them before the khanumbra. I must speak to our people, before we go to meet our deaths.”

The Ashlanders were roused from stupor stained sleep by running cry and the rough shoulder shake, their lurching legs sent stumbling in the encroaching grey dawn. Gritty voices rose in enquiry and outrage, were silenced by Doom-Derch’s explanations and the armed and armored dancers pounding on the cold beach below. Then all was swift grimness and stoic purpose. Warriors rushed to don their chitin plates and wield their weapons, their axes and short swords and longbows, their spears and sabers, as their slightly more civilian brethren too seized up every sharp edge and pointed tip in the camp; the Zainab had their warriors, but when it came to strait and strife, all would fight with feral ferocity. They gathered, bristling with blades and armor, en masse before the khanumbra, a harsh transmogrification of the previous day’s scene.

Shabael faced them, hard and pale in his spiked armor, a long spear in one hand and a small, spiral-grained wooden shield strapped to the other. His gulakhans backed him, similarly arrayed; Kanly, with bow; El-Sayal, with sword; Naib, in his mock-bonemold cuirass; Derch, hefting a jagged axe. Their breath misted in the winter air. And Maissel, too, stood with his nephew, unarmored but clutching the two serrated chitin blades he had been given, Maela at his side in fierce defiance brandishing a spear at the sky despite her mother’s protests. The Ashkhan stepped forward.

“My people,” he began grimly, “the Salt-Mouth Velothi come for our blood. They come to destroy us. Every mer and womer of that clan musters as I speak to rise up and eradicate our people. And… I must tell you… they may be able to do it.”

“They are many!” he shouted. “Many, and strong. We are strong, but we are few. We may fall before them, before their numbers. To deny that is to deny reality. But I tell you, my people, my tribe, we will not fall without a fight! We will not die running in fear! If we die, we will die with fire in our hearts and Ahemmusa blood on our blades!”

His people answered him with the raw, razor-bladed roar that only enraged Dunmer could produce. Maissel’s heart thudded in his pointed ears.

“Aye!” Shabael went on. “Aye, we are strong, and brave, and we will die deaths worthy of our courage! But we must remember,” he added, “the true purpose of our fight. We fight to win! We struggle for success, as ever we must! And so we cannot allow the Zainab to be destroyed utterly in this battle, for then the Ahemmusa will truly have won. We must preserve our tribe.” He gave a rasping sigh. “I admit, though… I do not know how this may be done. It is too late to send away the children and mothers, and there is no place to hide them. So I ask you, in my lack: what should be done?”

Whispers spread in the wake of his words, worried, confused, distraught. He waited, bleak face growing bleaker, mist puffing from his pierced nostrils, but his tribe had no answer for him. Silence pooled in the crowd.

“No one has a thought?” he growled. “No one. Ahhh, it seems –“

“Wait!” a voice screeched suddenly. A figure pushed to the front of the crowd, shouldering aside armored figures, elbowing short ribs and kicking at knees; bent old Muiri in an ancient leather battle shawl, two long forked pokers in her withered hands. “Wait!” she shrieked again. “I had a thought! Who has the favor of the ancestors? Who lifted their curse from our tribe? He did!” One poker jabbed toward Maissel, and the fat-smith jumped, alarmed. Him? “Ask him what to do! Ask him to ask the ancestors to save us!”

Cries of assent rippled through the crowd; he had exorcised the ancestors’ bane, he had their favor, he knew their ancient secrets, let him ask the spirits to save them! He had lifted their curse! Let him save them from the Ahemmusa, too!

The Ashkhan turned to his great-uncle, grave face speculative. “They have a point, Maissel,” he said. “So what say you? What should we do?”

The old mer blinked, alarmed. What should they do? How was he to know?!? He was not a warrior! He had only been Zainab in truth for one night, and they wanted him to save them? His heart thudded chilled blood, pounding against his skin; they were all looking at him, expectant, hopeful, a mass of shining red and black eyes, Shabael grim and waiting, derch reserved, Harah hopeful, and Maela, sweet Maela, staring up at him with those eyes filled with fierce faith, the head of her spear pressed against her plump cheek as her stomach pressed against his side, and he didn’t know what they wanted him to do, he couldn’t think through the pressure tightening in his old skull, and by Almsivi what was he supposed to do!?

And then, quite suddenly, he knew. The knowledge dawned on him like three bubbles of instinctual swamp gas, and he stared for a moment at nothing, in awe. Then he shook himself, and spoke with haste.

“There are two things we can do to save ourselves,” he said in a rush. “The first is to hide our children and their mothers; for this we must flee into the village. There is a secret cave below where they may be safe, as our warriors fight.” Gasps of hope and amazement rang through the crowd at his words, but he ignored them. “The second thing to do is to summon the spirits to our aid in battle. I will see to this. Someone bring me a cask of oil!” he shouted, and turned hurriedly away. Laughter echoed through the camp as the people scattered to answer his request; their hearts were light, for their fat-smith had a plan!

“You truly know what you’re doing?” growled Shabael as Maissel crouched down by the remains of the fire to retrieve the ancestor candle.

“No,” he answered, straightening up with the half burnt urn-candle in one hand and the liquid grease of his father in the other, “but I have an idea, and at this point we’ve nothing to lose. So light this candle, nephew,” he said, handing the urn to Shabael, “and we will see what can be done.”

The cask was brought, its lid pried open to reveal the red-brown scathecraw oil within – and Maissel set to work, assuming again his heartfelt fat-smith’s forge with the spirit of his father, with the last of his fat in hand, with his liquidized suet waiting for purpose. A flash of warmth, a visceral thudding connection in his chest, a quick assent, and the yellowish fat was poured out into the red-brown oil; flesh diluted, spirit transmuted. And far below, the beach branding Ahemmusa roared in anticipation; their ritual was done! The time for battle, for genocide, for their just triumph! – had come! The stone-spired sea slipped into seeping rush, swallowing their bodies into its icy maw, and murmurs of worry shivered through the watching Zainab. The Ahemmusa were coming, slipping toward them beneath the waves; they would break on the shores with the tide; they would stream past the walls of Vos; they would surround the Zainab camp and destroy their tribe, unless their fat-smith could save them!

But Maissel was moving, dipping his hands into the oil impregnated with his father’s fecundity; the spirits were with him, hope was with him, Mystery and Love and Knowledge suffused him, and he would save them! His broad palms cupped together, brimming with oil shining in the first true rays of dawn, and he turned toward his nephew, toward the bone stricken tattoo bound mer in pale armor standing before him and cupping the flickering ancestor candle in hands just as wide as his uncle’s.

“Ashkhan,” the fat-smith intoned gravely, “I give you the oil of our people’s spirit, blessed by the flesh and soul of my father; your grandfather. Imbibe it by porous adhesion, let it imbue your body, that you may burn with the fire of our ancestors.” The hands rose, dripping shining droplets, and parted over the Ashkhan’s head; oil slicked his black hair to his skull, seeped along his skin, oozed down around the protrusions of bone puncturing his face. The fat-smith’s glistening hands eased the urn-candle from his nephew’s, and began to raise the flame toward the dark crown of his oily head. Shabael started back, alarmed, frightened; the flame would ignite his skin, if it reached him. Not even a Dunmer would survive that; he would die in searing agony. But his great-uncle leaned forward, wrinkled red eyes confident, sure, and stalwart.

“The ancestors are with me,” he whispered and rasped. “Trust the ancestors, Shabael. All will be done to their will.” The Ashkhan’s jaw flexed, his nostrils flared, his mouth thinned – but he nodded, and stared stoically into the dawn as the fat-smith raised the flame once more to his skull. Spirit infusion met ancestral flame, and in Shabael al-Kaushad, Ashkhan, ancestor-anointed, the two were entwined.

The oil ignited with a rush; flames raced from apex to base of the mer’s rigid body. The crowd gasped, crying out in dismay and fear, but their Ashkhan remained as silent as death, as slumbering spirits, as the pale flames wreathed his body, a flickering, licking, convulsing veil shrouding his wide, vacant eyes. Then his jaw jerked open, and his arms thrust triumph to the bucking winds.

“Kaushad al-Uroshnor al-Shabael is come!” he shouted, and his voice was multilayered and grittily distonal. “The ancestors are with me, my people! The spirits save us!” He blazed, unburning, a wick incarnate in otherworldly flame, and his people roared their amazement, their joy, and their praise so loudly unto the skies that the villagers below shifted in their beds and the Ahemmusa falted at the dull booming windborne shiver that shook the waves. They surged forward, not just warriors but all of them, mer and womer, young and old, muscled and atrophied, clamoring to the fat-smith to bear his blessed oil, to follow their Ashkhan’s example, to let the strength of their ancestors flow through their flesh and illuminate the world and blaze forth their future. And the fat-smith obliged, pouring handful after cupped handful of red-brown oil over heads, across chests, into bosoms, upon shoulders. He flung it over the crowd, upon his people, and the anointed Ashlanders hurried one by one up to their blazing Ashkhan, to extend a single finger into the flame with nervous caution or to fling themselves within his pale shroud with earnest eagerness, to ignite themselves upon his possessed flesh.

And so as the tide surged on the shores below Vos and the Ahemmusa rose up from the freezing waves, salt heavy water streaming from their dark mouths, bitter mist huffing from their dripping armor and chilled weapons, the Zainab effulged against the sky, possessed, enflamed, enthralled, burning with hope and brash fury. And the Salt-Mouth Velothi charged forward up the slopes, trampling Vos’ neat sand paddies, a long line of snarling Dunmer screaming their ferocity over the land, pounding up toward their ancient enemies around Vos’ battle-vised walls. They charged, and on the heights the wind surged, and flared Velothi flame down from the craggy stone, streaking down the rocky path in explosive ferocity, the entirety of the Zainab tribe, past and present, dashing into battle wreathed in their ancestors’ fire and fury. They blasted forth on the winds, all self-preservation forgotten, all fear forbidden, consumed with vengeance and the bloodlust and pride of ten generations.

So clashed the Velothi on the rugged slopes surrounding Vos in the pale winter dawn, salt-soaked mist-breathers arrayed against an insatiable ancestral conflagration. And the villagers roused in worry and fear, and knew that they had been caught once again in Ashlander warfare, and went hurrying and scurrying to their posts on the walls to ensure the battle did not reach their halls, the more fortunate fleeing away down to their troglodytic hidey-hole. Fierce was the fighting, like the lock-jawing fang wrestles of kagouti and alit juvenility; blade met spear and spear axe, chitin to chitin and chitin to flesh. Voices roared and soared in the whipping wind, rough and gruff and bloodily rasping. And the Zainab could not be touched. They flashed and flared and dared, armored and not, young and old, warrior or no, and the dripping blades of the streaming Salt-Mouth Velothi horde could not reach them. They danced aside at the last moment, or caught only cloth, or outright shattered on coming too cose; the Zainab burned with their ancestors’ ferocity, and the spirits protected their own. So the Zainab pushed ever forward, trampling the Ahemmusa into the grit of their wake in blatant, savage disregard for the other tribe’s power and numbers. And bit by bit the Ahemmusa were beaten back to the waves, and sent fleeing into their beloved sea, broken, blasted, shown once more, at last, their proper place in the order of things. The Zainab roared their triumph on the trampled shores, and the wind roared with them. They had won. The Zainab of old had returned. They had reclaimed their birthright supremacy at last.

But the battle was not yet truly complete. Such was its vigor, such was its fury, that it spilled out past the village’s gates, into Vos’s streets, and the settled people set for ward screamed and fled alongside the terrified Ahemmusa even as most of the Zainab rejoiced in their victory on the shore below. And when the last of the Salt-Mouth Velothi lay dead on the stones, the possessed Zainab were only further enflamed, further intoxicated, spurred on to greater feats by the rush of at last returned power to their blood. The lust for the raid suffused their souls, and the Ashlanders flooded the streets of larval Vos, howling like the wind. Doors collapsed before boots; the possessions of the settled people were strewn garish and pitiful out in the streets; old Arasea Drenim was spitted on a spear, a hammer in each defiant hand as her son fled; villagers screamed in pain and fear as they fled to their subterranean salvation; stragglers, mer and womer both, were thrown down on the stones and covered with the flaming flesh of the conquerors. Copper hair blazed even more fiercely than usual; Yahad laughed as she chased a panicked youth, a terror stricken Yakin into a home and down its stairs; pinned him to the wall by the cave sanctuary’s egress with her spear nestled threateningly in his ribs; jerked his head aside by its red hair to sink a bruising, dominating bite into his throat; and to Yakin’s overwhelmed hyperventilation, tore the mer’s trousers open with one harsh hand. And all over the town the scene was repeated in all its degradation and perversion, its disregard for the purity of blood and blasphemy, in alleys and hallways, on tables and marital trundles. The Velothi wind scourged through shattered Vos, merciless in its violation.

And nowhere was that wind less forgiving than in the chapel. It slammed the door back against the wall, whirled over the ash pit, swirled, cackling beneath the stained glass dome, rushed over the skin of the shrouded figure crouching in interrupted prayer. Her skin prickled, pinned, thrilled to the bitter wind sliding beneath her marital veil, and Chana staggered to her feet, lungs clenched, spine throbbing icily.

In the doorway stood Shabael, braced against the skirling wind, flickering with flame, a spiral grained shield gleaming on his arm, bristling with armor and bone and the covetous ferocity of his magma eyes. Her entire body seized up.

“You cannot hide in here, girl!” the Ashkhan growled in his thrice layered rasp. His wide lips twisted wryly. “What were you waiting for, Chana? A husband? Your husband is not here to protect you.” The fiery figure stepped forward, boots ringing on the stonemold floor.

“Stay away!” she gasped, scrambling backward. “Stay away from me you – you barbarian!”

The Ashkhan threw back his head and roared laughter to the dome above. “Barbarian, am I, girl?” he said. “You had no such words for me before.” He strode forward, bone stricken face grinning, wide raw-tendoned hands flexing at his armored sides, his mushroom-shield flashing with the light of his shroud. Chana’s back hit the wall. She fumbled wildly around behind her, feeling for something, anything, with which to defend herself. Cold metal hit her fingers; the cast iron candelabra. She jerked it around before her, jabbing its trio of candles at the Ashlander. He stopped short, still grinning widely. Dark gaps showed between his teeth; flames flickered heartlessly before his face.

“Why are you here?” she hissed breathlessly, arms shaking with the weight of her weapon. The wind whipped and whistled through the open door. “Why are you here?”

“Why, to fulfill all your deepest desires,” the Ashkhan answered with that impossibly long tongue. “You wanted a husband, didn’t you? Well, I told you myself that they turn up in all kinds of unexpected situations.” Rage surged in the girl, at that, and she snarled at the Ashkhan as she stabbed forward with her makeshift spear; mock her, would he? Sneer at her pain? Why, she – but then his swift strong hand had slammed down on the iron bar and ripped it from her grip to clatter loudly to the floor, and she was pulled close to his narrow, tattooed dremora-face by the huge hands encircling her upper arms. His face, his mesmerizing, fascinating, hideous face filled her vision. She was inside his otherworldly veil, within its writhing, licking caress, and without warning a dizzying rush filled her, vising her skull, swirling in her vision. The face before her swam sickeningly; the piercings were gone, the teeth replaced, the nose slightly narrower; the mouth moved, and no sound reached her ears. His fists shook her, and she flopped limply in his grip.

“I’m here to make you an honest womer!” he growled down at her, lips unmoving. “I’m here for you, Ghanimah!” She could only stare, terrified, paralyzed, helpless, limply yielding in his arms. But something within her was not helpless, not paralyzed; someone in her heart knew what to do and had the fire to do it. It was as though she saw it happen before it actually did; her lips, curling and snarling; the spittle streaming from between her teeth; the white flecks staining the mer’s blood flushed cheeks. And she saw, too, her tumble through the air as the Ashkhan growled and threw her down upon the ash pit behind him, saw the impact of her blue-robed – blue-robed? – body before she felt the thud of connection and the bone shards digging into her back through her stained shroud. She stared up at the furious, panting Ashlander from dazed eyes. The room seemed strangely twinned; shadows stretched in dual direction; sunlight streamed through the dome above at two distinct angles; two mer glared down at her; and her heart thudded with the rapidity of two terrified and aroused womer, not one. The Ashkhan’s multitoned voice whispered its own dichotomy down to her, harsh and ominous.

“Run.”

And she ran, scrambling up from the pit of her ancestors and flashing out through the gaping door of the chapel, out where the wind howled and her people screamed, out where the streets ran with blood and chaos. She ran, not knowing where she was going, not knowing where she wanted to go, following the instincts whispering in her ear and the intoxicating drive of the twinned emotions ignited by the flaming mer behind her. She dashed through the streets in her ash stained shroud, ignorant of the debauchery around her, knowing only the exhilaration of exertion, of the clenching of her long thighs and the raw tearing rasp of hot breath through her lungs, the thrilling investment of the prey in flight. She ran, and as she ran she realized to where she fled, that her body sought the old dreaming sanctuary of her chandler’s home in unthinking resort. But as it dawned on her it died, for suddenly it also seemed that she ran away from the village, up the steep slope outside its walls, and yet again that she fled down, through the rocky hills toward the safety of that encircling stonemold. Thrice-compounded experience enfolded her, but she ran on, heedless.

Then she was through the chandler’s door, back into the tiny front room she had saturated with her dreams, back before the ancient mushroom table for which she had mustered for so long. The place had been empty since her fiancée had been captured… but a fire burned on the hearth stone. Two blurred figures stood before the roaring flames; a thin mer in chitin armor with his back to the room, and a womer before him, in his arms, holding his head down to her bare neck as her long black tresses fell back on his shoulder with her limp head. Chana stared, amazed, terrified, but a clatter sounded behind her, and she spun around.

Shabael stood framed in the doorway, black against the pale of risen daylight. She leaped away from him, stumbling and scrambling over the table, breath coming ragged, heart racing still with double any possible natural rapidity.

“I knew you were a runner,” he grated, stepping forward and swinging the door shut behind. She faced him, trembling on the dark hearth. “Is this where your husband lives, girl?” He strode slowly across the room, undoing the buckles of his chitin bracers and tossing them onto the table. His wooden shield followed; spiral grain on gleaming spiral grain. He stopped before her, red eyes pulsing, and she spun around, shaking, glaring down into the empty fire place.

“It doesn’t look like your husband is here to save you,” he whispered by her ear. His voice dripped off that long tongue and slithered down her spine. “But… do you really want him to be?” And his lips were on her skinny throat, his long tongue was stroking her skin with its nubbin of bone and his huge hand had reached around to cup her between her legs; the fire was hot and blazing before her, and her head fell helplessly backwards onto his shoulder.

And suddenly her arousal turned fierce, and she had seized his head by it short, oily black hair and slammed it against the stone mantel, driven her bony elbow hard into the chitin plates over his short rib and was stumbling away from him, flesh suffused and burning with life. He swore, clutching his bleeding forehead, but within seconds she had been thrown roughly down onto the pile of pillows she had arranged long ago before the hearth, and Shabael’s fists had shredded her wedding shroud in one swift rip. She struggled, she screamed, she bit and clawed and scratched as the mer tied her wrists and ankles together behind her with her own wadded veil, but for all her resistance, when the mer’s naked body was finally upon her, her muscular thighs clamped around his waist as hungrily as her mouth svcked his bone-studded tongue down her throat.

Such was the reinstated supremacy of the Zainab; such was their savage celebration; such was the breach of Vos. The shift long awaited had sprung; the scrib had cracked at last between the alit’s serrated fangs. And it seemed strange, horrific, perverted, to the villagers huddling below in their sodden sanctuary; it seemed catastrophic and unheard of. They lost crops, they lost gold, they lost lives to the grasping clutches of the Velothi raids, but they did not give up blood, they did not sacrifice productive potential, they did not break before their wild cousins, no matter their ferocity. But that day, that raw morning, that terrible dawn, they had lost all of those things; all their gates, large and small, had been broached and profaned; their chandler and all the benefits of his craft had been stolen; their youngest daughter had been carried away naked and bound with the remains of her shredded bride-veil over an Ashkhan’s shoulder. They had shattered in gradient shock betwixt the blazing Zainab and the frost-panting Ahemmusa, and that did not happen.

But for all of that day’s terror, all its chaos, all its tragic incomprehensibility, all its lack of precedent in living memory, it was not so unusual. In essence, in character, in heart, it left Vos but little altered. Their walls had been breached, as none could remember, but on a larger scale it was not so strange; that tough little Temple town had been ravaged and harried time and again through the eras, and always set stalwartly to repair and regrowth with barely a pause, just as the grim villagers cowering in their cistern that day had already begun planning their recovery. Their chandler had been stolen, had left them, had betrayed them for love and blood and granted the fruits of his craft to the Velothi in terrible retribution, but it was not so unusual; the craft had come down to them from the Zainab, after all, and who was to say that the Zainab themselves had not stolen it, before that, from Vos itself? Who could say which Dunmeri splinter had first seen the power of the fat-smith, back in the era of Vos’ inception? Their blood had been tainted with that of the Velothi; they had been [censored] and brutalized; their chandler had sired a child upon an Ashlander; their Hetman’s daughter had been carried away to the Ashkhan’s yurt for his pleasure in bondage, but this, too, was not so unusual, not so unheard of. How could it be, when the chandler’s blood had already been mixed with that of the migratory Dunmer, when Chana was just one more in a long line of captured flesh toys and just as apt to turn mother and wife in captivity as any of the rest? Who was to say, too, that the flow was unidirectional? Who was to say that the next generation would not see a reversal of roles, a resurgence of daring Gares to seduce Ashland womer into their more sedentary lives? Who could say?

No; Vos was shaken, wounded, rattled, but it was not changed. The chandler had done no more than issued in the end of one turn of the cycle of history in Morrowind’s heart in the shadow of the spoke of Red Mountain, no more than completed one more revolution of the same classical epoch. He had not changed Vos; not he, not the mer who exemplified its soul. He had no more power to change the place of his birth than he had had to resist the larval pressures that made him leave it. No; if change was to come to that tiny, ancient village – and change always comes – it would have to come from elsewhere. And it had not yet arrived.



But hark!
in mushroom-must mystery
the ovipositor of fate
a blood-eyed nymph
in t'lonya secretes


ANON ARYON ANON.



ET SEHT AL RHVLTOR AE HERMA-MORA-ALTADOON! AE AGHEA-ALTADOON!


The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

You write boldly, with complex sentences. And even though I've never played Morrowind and know little of the lore, I had no problem following this story. It's refreshing because it's not trite and you can't predict how it will develop or end. The characters and their culture, and the magic as well, all came to life very well.

Paragraph eight in chapter seventeen was the one-sentence paragraph that I noticed. I don't even remember the cliche. I was struggling to find anything to criticize at all. Sometimes modern language just seems out of place in fantasy and sci-fi, and you're stuck with familiar words and phrases. There's no point in worrying too much over it; don't be under-confident anyway.

Thanks again for the hard work.

Wow, you've never played Morrowind and you still liked my story? That's a compliment, for sure.

Ah, that one. That was for effect. Did you think it failed?

I don't even try to stay inside the bounds of what we would normally consider 'fantasy' or 'old fashioned' language, if that was what you meant, neither in my prose nor in my dialogue. Tamriel is an alien world, so there's no logical reason that their speech patterns should have followed ours; and anyway, all of the games have pretty much stuck to contemporary lingo. There's a line in Skyrim about how Potema's minions 'busted' through a wall, after all. So I don't worry about it.

I may be biased against one sentence paragraphs, but it does seem out of place with rest of your prose, which is not too slight like most fan-fiction. In this case the sentence was only three words. A little too slight, maybe. Some would argue that you can fatigue the reader with too many words, and you should give them a break with simpler sentences here and there. I don't see wordiness as a problem with this story, though.

I really get the impression that with the increase in 3D power of modern graphics that modelling and visual art has overtaken the writing that use to go into some of these games. There is some good writing in Skyrim, less in Oblivion, but this story makes Morrowind seem really deep. I hope some Devs get a chance to read this, and make a comment or two.

Anyway, I've given a judicious few days to bump this thread because I hope more folks will take the time to read The Chandler. The white text on black background is so much easier to read on a screen. You really can read dense prose from this site easily. Surprising that fanfiction.net doesn't use a light text/dark background. Microsoft Word use to have an option called, "White text/blue background." It was a simple thing to set, and today with Open Office I literally can't remember how I got it working like that.

The brevity is the power, in this case.

Ha, thanks for the compliment and your support. I've tried to do justice to Morrowind.