Hello, I would just like to preface this by saying I have never written a fan fiction before, nor have I ever even posted on a forum. So, if I've donked something up somewhere as I'm sure I must have, please forgive me and let me know. Any critiques at all on my story as well would be greatly appreciated too. My dream is to one day have something published in an official Elder Scrolls game, but that's just a dream. This piece of writing isn't even close to suited for that. Mainly, this wasn't wrote with canon conventions in mind. Creative liberties were taken and some lore here and there was stretched. A bit was just made up to suit my purposes. Oh, and I should probably mention to that this was written for my college composition class as a descriptive narrative. Without further ado, please enjoy.

Dance with a Deity

“Whistling, usually people do it when they’re happy. Others do it just to whittle away at their idle time. Some people can’t even do it. Those are the poor saps that I feel sorry for. But is whistling always a good sound? For instance, what if it’s caused by a sword whistling past your head? That’s where today’s tale begins, so stoke the fire and I’ll you of the time I came face to face with a god; why you should be wary of the horrid Hermaeus Mora.” The faces of my companions gathered around me began to fade as I lost myself to the memories.

I threw myself to the ground as the creature’s saber whistled over my head. An instant later I lunged at it and rammed the butt of my torch into its gut, battering it back and giving myself space to properly examine it. I had thought the thing a normal man when he called out to me as I traveled along the road through the night. He told me a wondrous story of an artifact in a nearby mine. Dubiously, I had followed him by the light of the moon to a gaping maw in the side of a mountain. He had looked normal enough then, but when I lit my torch for the journey into the depths of the ground, I could see the murderous, crimson tint in his eyes as he tore his blade from its sheath and sent it screaming towards my head.

Now, as I looked at him more closely, I cursed myself for my carelessness. It should have been obvious that the man was a vampire. He had a sickly look to him I hadn’t been able to see in the dim moonlight before. His skin was pale, almost translucent. The gaunt face only served to emphasize the fangs protruding from his mouth. The smell emanating from him now that I was close enough was the worst part of it all, though. The unwashed smell of a man living in the wilderness I could deal with, but on top of that was an overpowering scent of death, rot, and decay. I realized that the dark spots marking his clothes that I had thought the mud and grime of travel were actually stains from the blood and gore of past victims. Somethings just don’t wash out, just as the blood on his hands was unforgivable. With a slither of steel on leather, I dropped the torch and pulled my sword from its sheath with one hand and pulled my dagger from my belt with the other. I steeled my nerve as the wild beast prepared to launch itself at me again.

The sudden flurry of cuts was savagely strong, but I was quicker. Each time the monster swung, I simply reacted. Years of training and adventures had left me with unparalleled reflexes and timing. The brute’s unnatural strength was no match for my experience. Meeting his blows directly would have been folly. Instead, I diverted them or moved. It’s easy to avoid a blade wielded like a club. When his weapon arced towards my head, I caught it at the cross guard of my dagger and nudged it to the side, sending his blade shooting past my arm instead of at my head. When the fiend sliced horizontally at me, I hopped back. We continued like this until I had a comprehensive gauge of the thing’s abilities, and then I ended it. The vampire’s blood lust made him clumsy. His high, overhead cuts took too long. When he wound up for another one and brought his heavy attack careening down on my head I lashed out with sword and swatted the feral creature’s weapon to the side, sending his slash wide and off balancing him. Then, when he was open, I plunged my dagger through his heart. For a brief moment, I felt warmth return to his cold clammy skin as he writhed and the vampirism left his body. The man’s tremors stopped, and his face grew calm as he was finally granted the sweet release of death and faded into the void.

I looked around me and finally relaxed. The fight couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but I didn’t know what unwanted attention it may have attracted. Where there’s one vampire there’s always more, so I decided to retreat into the mine and lay low until day. I was confident it wasn’t the one in which the vampires made their lair, for the air at the entrance had a strong, musty smell of earth and animals. Vampire lairs tended to smell of blood and fresh kills. With nothing else to do and hours until dawn, I decided to explore the abandoned mine.

The tunnel itself seemed to have been dug into the mountain long ago and since forgotten. The main shaft was in rough shape, but it was still clear for the most part. Somehow, the remaining handful of old, wooden support beams had managed to keep the tons of rock above from flooding into the mine for all these years. Most of the secondary shafts had met the very fate I hoped to avoid. There, the supports had failed and the mountain reclaimed parts of the smaller tunnels, filling them with chaotic piles of rock. The only disturbances that punctuated my sojourn into the bowels of the earth, though, were the ominous creaking of the remaining supports, and the waterfall of dust that rained from the ceiling as a bat screeched and took flight. As I continued down the grim tunnel, I remained wary that the section I was in might cave in at any instant.

It wasn’t long before the tunnel came to an abrupt end. There in front of me, were two foreboding black doors that melded seamlessly into the smooth, flat wall that the tunnel ended in as if they had been wrought from the very stone around them. The very sight of the erie doors made me anxious. I felt as if the tunnel were pressing in around me. As if the mountain above me had come alive and was now straining against the rickety, wooden supports in an effort to crush me. I suddenly knew this aberrant door was not meant for mortals.

I swallowed my fear, grasped the handles, and flung the doors open wide ready for whatever must be inside. The room, however, was almost boring compared to the door. It was round and barren. The walls were the same nondescript, smooth stone of the tunnel wall. A strange, ambient light pervaded the room, but I couldn’t locate the source. The only ornament to the room was a oversized, black book placed perfectly in the center of the room. It was as thick as my dagger was long, and if it were opened it would stretch the length of my arm and from it an enigmatic sense of power seemed to egress. Embossed on the front cover was a most peculiar symbol. Within a circle there seemed to be a mass of ropes… or serpents… or… no, neither of those were quite right. And then it dawned on me, they were tentacles. As I scrutinized them, though, they seemed to... move.

I figured the only thing left to do now was open it, so I cracked it open and began to study the cramped lines of glyphs within. Whatever language it was, It wasn’t one that I could read. Then suddenly, from within the pages huge tentacles shot out of the book! I reached for my dagger, but before I could grab it tentacles seized me by each of my wrists and ankles and my another clamped around my torso, making it hard to breathe. I was thrust into the air, and a voice boomed out from the book and echoed painfully in the small chamber, “HOW DARE YOU LAY HANDS UPON MY BOOK? Vile mortal, know your place!” As I hung there, the glutinous, oily tentacles kept tightening until I could no longer breath and started to slip from consciousness. My lungs were burning and my vision had become a tunnel, but the last thing I saw was an otherworldly portal of ghostly flames manifest in front of me.

Sometime later I awoke. The first sensation I registered was, ironically, the lack of sensation. I was numb all over. As feeling gradually returned to my body, I immediately noticed a vile taste in my mouth. The taste of food dropped in a campfire and charred to a burnt husk. The taste of ashes. Choking back the urge to gag, I tried to sit up from where I was sprawled on the floor of dim room. Every muscle in my body shrieked in protest and an intense feeling vertigo overcame me. My world started to tip, and I collapsed out of breath, on the verge of passing out again. Suddenly, I heard a rustling and saw a blur of movement in the shadows at the edge of my vision, and a face wreathed in auburn hair appeared above mine.

An irritated, feminine voice rang out from the blurry image, “Stop moving. You’re not well yet. Passing through The Gate takes a lot out you. Just lay back and rest for now. I’ll...” I never heard her finish what she was saying as I slipped back into oblivion.

The next time I awoke went much better. I was still sore, but simply moving didn’t cause me so much pain as last time. I managed to prop myself up on the bars behind me in a sitting position to get a look around the room before the woman could stumble over to me again. The room, I realized, was actually some sort of cylindrical cage with a dome at the top. A second of panic ran through me when I saw that bars completely surrounded us, and there was no escape. No door, no hatch, nothing. We were trapped. Trapped like birds in a cage for display.

Through the bars I saw what seemed to be an ocean below us. But the water was wrong. Instead of water, there was a black, glossy, oil-like substance that churned in a frenzy as if it were alive. And then I saw that it was, or rather, the tentacles within it seemed to be. The black slime sea was rife with them. Now that I knew what they were I could see them everywhere. Out of the chaotic ripples they undulated like serpents and randomly thrust into the air as if to pierce the heavens. The sheer size of some of them was breathtaking. They must have been as big around as a sequoia tree. Yet they also ranged down to small as an arm. The pandemonium below stretched on to a grey horizon everywhere as far as I could see.

The cage itself was suspended above it all attached to gargantuan, oddly smooth spire of black rock covered in the same ooze of the sea. As the pillar of stone rose from the sea, though, it was twisted and turned into fantastic curves and loops. My mouth grew dry when I noticed it was moving ever so slightly. This wasn’t just some rock. It was so enormous I had assumed it was. The thing the cage was hanging from was a colossal tentacle!

My epiphany must have shown on my face when the voice of the woman crashed through my revery and brought my wandering mind back, “So you’re finally up,” she said smirking.

With a skeptical look on my face, I asked,“Who are you?” After everything that happened I wasn’t sure if I could trust her. In an attempt to divine her intentions, I fastidiously examined the girl. Her knotted, tangled mop sprawled down to her shoulders and framed a pale face mottled with orange freckles and smears of muck. If her hair weren't so dirty, it might have been orange too. As my eyes roved down to her clothes I saw tattered robes that looked as if they had gone through a war without being washed. They even looked as if they had once upon a time been a pristine blue, but now the edges everywhere were frayed and hastily scrawled patches autographed her clothes. From the autobiography she wore, I deduced she must have once been a mage of the College of Magic. The youth of her face, however, betrayed her. Everyone knows that mages stayed sequestered in their teachers’ towers until they reach their 30th name day, and this pup was still a decade shy.

She snapped me back into reality once again by asking, “Are you done yet? I’m not going to hurt you,” with an exasperated look on her face. “And before you ask, the answer is yes. I was expelled from the college. It’s not my fault that the spell went awry and nearly killed the headmaster! I’m completely competent and versed in all manner of magic!” The last part she said with an air of arrogance as if to prove it to herself as much as me.

“Oh really now?” I scoffed back at her.

Aggravation showed on her face and she spat back at me, “Look, if you want to escape from this place you’ll just have to trust me. Judging from the pitiful amount of magic I sense from you there’s no way you’re escaping on your own. Gods, you must only be a damn alchemist or something.”

Grinning, I informed her, “Actually, I’m just an adventurer. Some would call my skill with a blade magic, though.”

With a wary look, she asked, “What…? How did some who isn’t a mage get here? Were you hired by someone from the college to bring me back and steal the book from me? I don’t want to go back!”

“Actually… I’m not really sure where I am.” As I recounted the tale of my expedition in the night, her jaw slowly dropped.

Dumbfounded, she managed to croak, “Really?” She was silent for a few short time before beginning again, “You expect me to believe that you took on a vampire and lived without so much as a scratch? And then you just wandered into a cave and happened to stumble upon one of the most valuable and ancient artifacts in history?!”

A bit abashed myself now, I answered, “Yes? Could you at least explain to me what’s going on? My name is Grissom. Grissom Bane”
With a scowl on her face she replied, “Great, I’m stuck with a magicless dandy with a passion for storytelling. Things just went from bad to worse. Where are we? Right now we’re stuck in the realm of the daedric prince Hermaeus Mora. Do you even know what a daedric prince is? Ugh, don’t bother answering. A daedric prince is a type of malevolent deity. Right now we’re stuck in his own little realm of existence separate from the real world. The only way we’re going to get back is through the book again. Oh, and my name is Arrianna F’valda. That’s probably too long for someone like you, though, so just call me Anna.”

“Well when you say it that way it seems so simple,” I rolled my eyes. “Just how are we going to get to the book? And how do you even know where it is? There’s nothing out there but a sea of monsters,” I said gesturing outside the cage.

She sighed, “Life must be dismal without magic. I can sense the book on a platform above us. There’s something that’s alive up there too, and it’s big. I can’t tell more than that, but it’s probably guarding the book. Lucky for us, Hermaeus Mora isn’t here right now, so it’ll be easy. I’ll just teleport us up to the book, you fend off the beast while I use the book to open The Gate, and we leave through it.”
“Wait… why can’t we just teleport back to where we came from instead?” I asked.

She loosed a peal of laughter and said, “You non mages really don’t know anything. You can’t just leave the realm of a deity by your own means. We’re too far physically from our original plane of existence right now. Plus, we can’t just leave the book. That’s what I came here for. It contains magics so ancient they’ve been forgotten by mortals. Those college whelps think they’re so great. I’ll show them all!”

Amused now, I gently chided her, “You call me ignorant, girl? I’ve traveled from as far as the forests of Elswyr to the volcanoes of Morrowind, and I thought you didn’t want to go back?”

“I don’t!” she retorted immediately. “And I’ve read about those places and more,” she said with a haughty air.

Deciding it would be best to drop the matter for now, I said, “So when are we going to leave?”

She looked taken aback. “Oh… Well I guess… right now if you’re feeling better. I’ve thought about this for so long it seemed like it would never come to pass,” she trailed off. “Alright, I’ll cast a few quick spells to enhance your strength and durability so that thing won’t just crush you with one blow. I read that the favored servants of Hermaeus Mora are called Lurkers. That’s probably what’s guarding the book. A Lurker is an enigmatic entity rumored to be as tall as two men with the strength of three, but the few people that survived seeing one were too shocked to give much of a description. You’ll just have to be ready for whatever comes at you. Oh, a couple of the accounts mentioned a tentacle erupting from their mouths and punching straight through shields too, so you should probably avoid that. Ready?”
I groaned, “Ready as I’ll ever be.” I thought to myself what could easily be my last thought, “I can’t believe my life is in the hands of this brash, harebrained girl.”

As she began to chant her spells, the sound of them was so foreign I couldn’t sense of any of it. The sound of them was like a stream of tranquil water gracefully flowing through my mind, yet at the same time the sounds were oddly punctuated with staccatos. I felt a subtle of warmth as the spells settled onto me like a blanket. She began to chant louder and the stream turned into a torrent. Then everything went black for a few seconds and I felt myself being whipped about within the aether as wind rushed past my ears. Then as suddenly as it had started, everything stopped.

We found ourselves upon the edge of a plain, grey, circular platform with a dais in the middle and the book resting upon it. From the dais the platform stretched out about twenty meters in every direction. Ringing the platform all around and behind us were writhing tentacles that formed a wall of wet flesh. Between us and the book, though, was the Lurker.

Imagine the tallest man you have ever seen, then add three more feet. Now envision that body with the characteristics of gnarled fish from the deep, black reaches of the sea. Spines as long as my sword protruded from its elbows and shoulder. Two more stuck out of the sides of the goliath’s face. A small ridge adorned the top of its head, and an immense dorsal ridge of spines ran down its back. Its feet were like massive flippers of muscle, and it’s hands had huge talons instead of fingers. Between the two bulbous eyes on the sides of its head, though, was a terrifying crevice full of row after row of teeth. Coating the monster was the same oily blackness of the tentacles.

“Whoops,” Anna said, “I guess my teleport was a little off. Could you do me a favor and cause a distraction while I sneak around it, Grissom?” Without waiting for a reply she started chanting again and vanished from sight with a shimmer of invisibility.

With a shake of my head and an exasperated sigh, I unsheathed my weapons and charged the behemoth. Two meters from it, I leapt into the air and rammed my feet into the brute’s torso. I hit the ground and rolled back up to my feet within a split second. To my dismay, the mountain only staggered back a couple of steps. It must have been triple my weight. The only response it offered was a guttural screech towards the bleak sky that I thought would rend my ear drums. While I was dazed, the colossus lunged towards me, aiming its hand to skewer my heart. Groggily, I managed to stagger back out of reach just in time.

Shaking my head in an attempt to clear it, I lashed out at its leg and retreated. I only needed to bait it away from the dais and give Anna some space. The leviathan wasn’t even phased by the wound, though, and lumbered after me a few steps before stopping. Puzzled, I eyed it cautiously from a few meters away. As I watched it svck in air, I recalled Anna’s description of the spear-like tentacle shooting from the mouth and dove to the side as it began to release the gale. I heard a loud crash and saw a tentacle embedded into stone where I had just been standing. Seeing an opportunity, I sprinted at the giant hoping to catch it off guard. I was rewarded for my folly by being slammed to the ground as the tentacle retracted into the fiend’s mouth. I tried to scramble to my feet but the monstrosity’s claw shot towards me again. I had no other choice than to trust in Anna and hope I could survive the brute force of the strike; I raised my sword to meet the attack and hung on for dear life. True to her word, Anna’s spells held. A blow like that should have flattened me, but instead it only knocked me off my feet and sent me careening to the floor again. If I couldn’t find some way to gain the upperhand soon, this fight would be my last.

Movement from the dais suddenly caught my attention and Anna shouted, “Close your eyes!” I did as I was told. Through my closed eyelids I felt a searing flash of light and heard the enraged creature bellow.

“You’re on you’re own now. I need the rest of my magic to get us home,” and with that Anna left me to take care of the demon as she rifled through the pages of the book.

Determined to make use of the brief, precious seconds Anna blinding light had bought me, I examined the impregnable fortress before me for weaknesses. Its hide was tough, but it could be cut. The bulging eyes were vulnerable too. Prodigious as the titan was, however, a few wounds wouldn’t slow it down. That left a killing blow to the neck, head, or the heart. Noticing the foul being’s prominent rib cage, I decided the last option would be the quickest route to destruction.

As the freak of nature recovered, I hurled my dagger end over end until it was embedded in its eye. Now all I had to do was wait for the right moment. The mutant howled with fury. It glared at me with malice this time as the tentacle shot out from its ruined face, just as I wanted. With its impaired vision, the thing’s aim was off. Not by much, but it was enough. As the tentacle sped towards me, I dashed around the it and on towards the beast. When I was within range, I rammed my blade up through its ribs until the cold steel sunk into the warm heart. I abandoned my weapons and rolled away as the abomination began to thrash about in its death throes. I walked toward the dais as the monster’s anguished cry of death crashed harshly into my ears.

Anna was smiling, “That was actually rather clever, bravo! If you’re done playing now, though, I’ve found the spell to take us home. Let’s go!”

I grunted in response and listened to the archaic tune of her chanting once again as she opened The Gate. It appeared in front of us in a blaze of translucent blue flame. “I’m just glad this is all over,” I muttered.

“Not so fast.” An ominous voice rasped in the air.

I noticed Anna had grown exceedingly pale and began to shake. All sense of her previous bravado vanished as she whispered, “Oh gods… Not now… I was so close. It’s… Hermaeus Mora!”
Tentacles seemed to puncture the very fabric of the air in front of us and ripped it open wide to reveal a great, green eye. The tentacles bloomed out in every direction making the eye look like the center of perverse, sickly sun. “Indeed, imbecile, you should cower before me. If that man hadn’t impressed me by slaying my servant, you’d both be doomed to an eternity of imprisonment. Instead, I suppose I can grant mercy just this once. In return, you must take my Black Book out into the world and use my forbidden knowledge. It shall be my instrument of mayhem, and you shall be my champion to wield it.” And with that, the rent in the air blinked shut and the apparition vanished. The portal was before us once again. Stunned, we both staggered through it towards home.