Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She’s seven years old, and she is falling. Gelethys grabs for another branch, but it slips from her hand before she can latch on. Her tiny body crashes through the undergrowth, slowing down some but nowhere near enough. She screams, throwing up her arms in some frantic attempt to break her fall and not her face, wrenching her eyes shut like it’ll do any good—

But the impact never comes.

Hesitantly, fearfully, Gelethys opens her eyes. The ground is maybe an inch away, maybe two. It’s not coming any closer. As she watches, the ground gets further away. Or maybe she does. Three inches, five, eight. A whole foot!

The scare of earlier already all but forgotten, Gelethys laughs as she’s telekinetically lifted out of the bushes. She stops short as her eyes meet those of her savior. Her grin fades.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. 

It’s not enough. It’s never enough. 

“Perhaps, if you paid better attention in your studies, you would be able to save yourself. Learn to do magic properly , or stop taking unnecessary risks. I won’t catch you again.”

She punctuates her statement by dropping Gelethys back into the undergrowth. The fall is much slower this time, but that still doesn’t stop her from letting out a surprised—not to mention terrified—yelp.

The breath’s knocked clean out of her. Her chest feels tight. She can barely breathe. Otherwise, she’s fine, so that has to be enough. It has to be. She scrambles to her feet, words of hopeless apology already waiting on her lips.

It’s not enough. She’s already gone.

She’s twenty-five years old, and she’s freezing. Not literally, although that really, really wouldn’t be much of a stretch. Northern Skyrim, particularly Windhelm, is a far cry from the lovely temperate climate of Mournhold. To be fair, the climate’s really the only thing that could be described as lovely about Mournhold these days. But still.

It’s cold. Too cold. She must have kicked off the covers sometime in the night, probably because she normally doesn’t use covers at all and she normally doesn’t need covers at all. Explains why she’s so goddamn cold. She pulls them back up and rolls over. Scrunching her eyes shut, she shoves her face into the pillow, and makes the best attempt she can at going back to sleep.

It doesn’t work. 

She shouldn’t be surprised. She’s too cold, too awake, and it’s too damn bright . She forgot to close the curtains last night. Again. Goddammit. So much for getting back to sleep anytime soon.

She still takes her sweet time in getting ready for the day. It’s partially because she can , now, she doesn’t have anywhere particularly pressing to be or anything, really, to do. 

Otherwise, it’s because she’s a born-and-bred Morrowind dunmer and before recently had never left Morrowind. So she doesn’t have any of the cold tolerance Aunt Adra or her son do from living in Skyrim for so long, and it’s cold cold cold and she hates it. But it’s better with layers. Marginally.

If she’d had a choice, she’d never have left. She’d be back home in Mournhold, with her dads and her sewers and the constantly looming threat of the Camonna Tong discovering what she’s up to. But of course, they already did.

She did have a choice, of course, but a choice between life and death is really no choice at all. Go to Windhelm and lie low for a while with her aunt, or stay in Mournhold to die. At least this way, she might, theoretically, be able to go home again someday.

The longer she stays in Windhelm, the longer she stays in Aunt Adra’s guest bedroom and helps out around the house—the more she begins to wonder if she’ll ever be able to go home. If it’s even worth it staying away.

But it is. It has to be. It’ll just be for a little while longer, and then she’ll get to go home, and everything will return to normal.

“Morning,” Gelethys mumbles as she stumbles into the kitchen.

Adrasea looks up from the pot she’s stirring over the fire pit and raises a single, perfect eyebrow. She cracks a grin and says, “Afternoon, dear girl. I was beginning to worry.”

That would explain where Gael is, or rather where he isn’t: here.

“Oh. Whoops. Didn’t mean to sleep in that long.”

“It’s perfectly alright, clearly you needed it.” 

Adrasea stirs the pot, raises the ladle to her lips and sips at what appears to be either a thick soup or a thin stew. She nods to herself, then looks at Gelethys and adds, “That, or you’re depressed, in which case sleep certainly can’t hurt.”

Gelethys opens her mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again. “I’m not depressed.”

“No,” Adrasea agrees. “Stew?”

“Sure.” 

Her stomach grumbles at the thought. She might be getting tired of Skyrim, but Aunt Adra’s stew is really, really good. She’ll never get tired of that.

Adrasea ladles up a steaming bowl within moments. Gelethys accepts it gratefully, taking a seat by the fire pit as she does. She admits, after a couple sips, “You weren’t born in Skyrim, were you? How did you get used to it?”

“Skyrim itself?”

“That, and, well…” Gelethys shivers.

“The cold?” Serving up a bowl for herself, Adrasea looks into her eyes and nods to herself. “The cold, then. I’ve been here for decades, dear girl. Since not long after the Great War ended, in fact. You would have been too young to remember, of course.”

“Obviously. I was a baby .”

“Time helps, as does the fact that I married a Nord. I got used to it eventually.” Sticking a fork into her stew, Adrasea pauses, considers something. “Of course, there are warmer parts than Eastmarch. Particularly in winter.”

“At this point, I’m starting to forget that places without snow exist.”

“Skyrim can do that to you! To be fair, you are staying in one of the coldest places in Skyrim. It snows year-round here. Other holds, it only snows part of the year, or not at all.”

“Lucky me.”

“Really. Take Falkreath, or the Rift for example. Nice and temperate there especially. If it weren’t for the Thieves Guild—”

“The what.” Suddenly very interested, Gelethys stares at her with wide eyes. “I thought the Thieves Guild got disbanded years ago?”

“Please.” Adrasea snorts. “You try disbanding a group of thieves. It won’t fetching work, not permanently. Though, from what I’ve heard? Skyrim’s guild doesn’t really keep in touch with the other groups. Some bad blood there, who knows?”

“You already know more than I thought you would.” 

Despite her best efforts, her heart’s pounding. This is too good to be true. Never mind that kindly Aunt Adra shouldn’t , logically, know much of anything about thievery. Not unless she’s dabbled in it herself. 

“No, dear girl, I’m no thief. My brother was.”

Gelethys winces. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, he’s not dead. He and his… boyfriend? Husband? I’m still not actually sure—are happily retired and running a kwama mine near Balmora.”

“Oh.” 

Gelethys can’t quite imagine retiring. Not willingly, anyway. She’d need something to retire for. Which, she figures, Adrasea’s brother must have had. Lucky him, having someone to retire for.

She might have had someone, a pretty girl from Ald’ruhn, if the Camonna Tong hadn’t ruined her fetching life and forced her to flee to Skyrim.

  Fuck the Camonna Tong.

“So where’s Gael?” Gelethys asks after a few minutes. “Out hunting, or…?”

“Not this time.” Adrasea smiles sadly, stares into her nearly empty bowl of stew. “He’s gone off to join the Imperial Legion.”

“He didn’t even say goodbye?”

Gelethys might not know her cousin very well, but she knows him well enough to know that’s… really, really out of character for him. She frowns. “Is he okay?”

“He punched Rolff Stone-Fist into the river and ran.”

Ah. That would do it.

“Well, it’s not like he doesn’t deserve it. Rolff, I mean. Not Gael. He’s been talking about joining the Legion for so long, I never thought he’d actually…”

“Do it? Me neither. But maybe he has the right idea.” Adrasea looks pointedly at Gelethys and says, firmly, “You’re not going to be happy here. Not in Windhelm. If I had to recommend anywhere in Skyrim, I’d say Riften. They could use someone like you.”

“You really think so?”

Adrasea nods silently.

“Wait, does that mean—you know them?”

This time, she gets a shrug. “Not well. Knew of them, certainly. They’ve been on the decline since the Great War ended. Seems like a lot of things have. I can’t put in a good word for you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But you want me to go there. Try to join?”

“And know you’re welcome back here if it doesn’t work out. But I would like you to try.”

Gelethys raises an eyebrow. “Damn, you want me out of the house that much?”

“I wouldn’t mind the additional privacy, but no. I just…” With a scrape of her fork, she cleans out the bowl. “I don’t like seeing people wasting away. You could be doing so much more. You’d definitely be happier doing something .”

“I won’t say you’re wrong. But I won’t say you’re right either.” A glare from Adrasea makes her sigh and pass over her own empty bowl. “Okay, you may have a point. Still. If they’re anything like the Camonna Tong—”

“They’re not,” Adrasea says firmly. “That, I can promise.”

“Then… I’ll give it a shot.”

As tempted as Gelethys is to do as her cousin did and punch a racist fetcher on the way out of Windhelm, she’d like to be able to come back. Punching the brother of the man only second to Ulfric himself would make that a little hard, and Gael knew that just as well as she does.

But he did it anyway. Now, he can never come home, unless the Stormcloaks lose their war. Gelethys can only hope. Worst part is, she’d agree with them if they didn’t hate her and everyone else who happens to not be a nord simply on principle.

She can’t exactly agree with the Imperial Legion, either, but they’re better than the alternative. Not that it’s saying much.

But Gael still dropped everything to join them.

“What a fetching idiot,” Gelethys says aloud, staring at the bridge across the River Yorgrim.  There’s no sign of anyone coming, no sign of Gael nor his telltale ruddy cloak flapping about in the wind. Of course he wouldn’t come back, he’s not welcome here anymore. Just like she’s not welcome in her own home either.

She misses Mournhold so much, in that way that only Mournholders can.

But she can’t go back there, and Gael can’t come back here, and Adrasea has a point. She’s not happy here, never has been. The guards are too suspicious of her simply by virtue of her grey skin and pointed ears for her to get away with anything.

Maybe in Riften, she can make a fresh start. Maybe she can get into the Thieves Guild. Maybe she can sprout wings and learn to fly, while she’s at it.

Still, it’s a better option than the alternative, and she’d like to make Kynesgrove at least before dark. So she takes up her pack, pulls up her hood again, and—

The gates open behind her. She looks back, expecting perhaps Adrasea, or at least someone she recognizes. It’s not Adrasea, but from the glimpse Gelethys caught under the newcomer’s hood, they—she?—are a fellow dunmer.

She walks quickly, too quietly to be anything but deliberate, and keeping her distance from the guards. As she passes, Gelethys reaches out and taps her on the shoulder.

“Under the bridge,” she says as the figure turns.

Red eyes meet indigo. Strange color, particularly for another dunmer—but pretty. Her new, odd-eyed friend studies her for a moment, then nods wordlessly.

Gelethys watches as she crosses the bridge, then slips under it at an angle the guards wouldn’t see. She’s scarcely hidden herself when the gate bursts open again, this time with more guards.

“Thief,” cries one of the newcomers. “There’s a thief—dirty little greyskin wretch. Did you see her?”

One of the gate guards nods, points across the bridge. “She went that way, talked to that one. Hey, you!”

Gelethys audibly sighs and calls back, without turning, “I have a name. What is it now? Fancy harassing me even more before I set off on my way?”

Another guard comes up to her, grabs her shoulder and turns her with force. “Not you. The thief had… weird eyes. Did you see her? Did she give you anything?”

As one often does when dealing with law enforcement, particularly in her line of work, Gelethys fixes a smile firmly to her face before answering. “I did try to talk to her briefly, I’d mistaken her for my aunt coming to see me off. Obviously she wasn’t, so I let her go on her way. It looked like she went towards Kynesgrove, if that helps any.”

“Your assistance is appreciated,” the guard says like he’d much prefer she didn’t cooperate so he could arrest her too. “Come on, Fjokir. We can still catch her before she leaves Eastmarch.”

The second pair of guards runs off towards the stables. Gelethys waits until they’ve ridden off towards Kynesgrove before going that way as well. She doesn’t even look under the bridge. She doesn’t need to.

Thieves look out for each other, after all. Or they should, anyway, but Gelethys suspects the reason she wasn’t dead before she could leave Mournhold was because she unintentionally assisted the Camonna Tong on more than one occasion.

She’s barely passed the stables when a tap comes on her shoulder. Gelethys turns to meet the woman with indigo eyes.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she says softly. “Thank you.”

The mystery woman is… really pretty, actually, and Gelethys can already feel her face heating up. She laughs nervously. “It was nothing. Really. Say, I don’t suppose—”

She’s alone again, already. Gele’s shoulders slump despite herself, and she finishes lamely, “—you have any connection to Skyrim’s guild? Yeah, I don’t know what I expected either. Stupid Gele. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

No time to dwell on stupidity now, she’ll have plenty of time on her way to Kynesgrove. So, with a sigh, she starts walking again.

She makes it to Kynesgrove just before sunset. According to the innkeeper, the Windhelm guards had been and gone, and were thoroughly irritated that they didn’t catch the thief they were looking for.

Gelethys fights to keep a smile off her face and says, lightly, “It happens. Can’t catch them all.”

Chapter Text

Gele’s da always used to say, when you find yourself in a new place, take a look around. See how it makes you feel, how it makes others feel, what the people are doing and where they’re doing it. She’s taken that a step further, personally, although in her da’s defense he hasn’t exactly left Mournhold lately. She looks at the businesses, busy and otherwise, and figures out why. She looks at the places the locals frequent, and the places they avoid like the plague, and figures out why.

Gelethys has never exactly been good at getting that gut feeling her da always spoke of, never been good at seeing into a place’s soul. She gets feelings and fragments, looks past the obvious to see what’s hidden and find out why. She’s always been good at asking why.

And yet, the first time Indarys Gelethys sets foot in Riften, the absolute last thing on her mind is asking why. She’d heard from travelers on the road that Riften is nothing but a den of thieves, not worth passing through if you fancied keeping your coin and your gear. She’d heard from others that the woman in charge is a mere puppet, nothing more, and the true powers that be thrive off Riften’s reputation as a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The guards at the gate certainly didn’t help that reputation. Gate tax, really? They can’t possibly fool anyone with that, and yet clearly they fooled someone or they wouldn’t keep doing it. But as Gele peers down the street into the city proper, one hand firmly on her bag and the other shading her eyes from the harsh sunlight of Sun’s Height, all thoughts of unscrupulous guards and warning-filled rumors abruptly give way to a single realization.

Riften feels like home.

Riften feels like home, and nothing she can think of explains why. 

That doesn’t stop her from trying, though, and when that fails she files that odd realization away for later. There has to be some reason, she just hasn’t thought of it yet. And before she can figure out that reason, someone taps her on the shoulder.

She whirls around, hand already going to her sword.

“Hey! Easy, neither of us want trouble now do we?”

The man talking’s vaguely nordic-looking with a face like a plowing accident and secondhand, unpolished steel armor. If it comes to it, Gelethys can take him in a fight.

That fact alone lets her relax some. She crosses her arms, sizes him up, raises a thick eyebrow.

“I don’t want trouble, believe me,” Gelethys says warily.

“Then you came to the wrong damn city.”

“Okay, point made.” She looks him in the eyes and says, firmly, “I don’t want trouble with you . One of us wouldn’t be walking away.”

It takes him about eleven seconds to register that she’s made a threat. His lip curls. He takes a step forward. He may be taller but he’s not stronger, and the idiot’s not wearing a helmet. A fireball to the face, then a slice of her sword, and it’ll all be over.

Really, though, Gelethys would rather not make a scene already, she’s been here for what, two minutes? Three? So she holds the s’wit’s gaze, doesn’t back down.

“Don’t say something you’ll regret,” the s’wit says finally. “Last thing the Black-Briars need is some loudmouth meddling in their affairs. Or trying to.”

The eyebrow quirks up further. “Well, you’d better tell me who the Black-Briars are, then. So I can avoid meddling in their affairs and all that. Wouldn’t want to meddle by mistake.”

The way he looks at her says, clear as day, I fucking hate you. The feeling is mutual, but unlike him, Gelethys knows how to be mature about it.

“The Black-Briars,” the s’wit says at last, “are who’s in charge around here. They’ve got Riften in their pocket, and the Thieves Guild watchin’ their back. So, if you know what’s good for you? Keep your gods-damned nose outta their business.”

“The Thieves Guild?”

“You’re damn right, the Thieves Guild. You’re telling me that’s what scares you?”

“Not really. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to join them.”

It’s a bit of a long shot. But it’s not like she’s inexperienced, exactly. As long as this Guild doesn’t turn out anything like the Camonna Tong back home, it’ll be a good place to settle for a while. Make some coin, learn the land, figure out where to go next.

The s’wit her a little differently now, more suspiciously. “You were, were you? Fine. But it’ll cost you.”

Gelethys reaches in her pack for a small coin purse, tosses it to him without a second glance. “Well? What can you tell me?”

“Try the Bee and Barb. Look for a red-headed man, well dressed, little heavyset. Tell him Maul sent you.”

“Maul,” she echoes. “Is that your name?”

“What’s it to you?”

She shrugs. “I’m Gelethys. Thanks. Don’t suppose I can get anything more out of you with that?”

“Depends. What’re you asking?”

“The Black-Briars. Who are they, what do I need to know?”

“I work for them, first of all.” Translation: watch it. “Only thing you need to know is: don’t cross Maven Black-Briar. If you do, you might as well scurry on back to Morrowind for all the good it’ll do you.”

Translation: cross Maven Black-Briar, and you’re dead. This isn’t the first threat she’s gotten, and it won’t be the last. Not in her line of work, and not with her oh-so-charming people skills.

Even so, she says, “Don’t worry. I’m not in the habit of crossing dangerous people.”

A more accurate thing to say would be that she’s not in the habit of crossing dangerous people without a good reason. But people tend not to appreciate the clarification. 

“You’re lucky I don’t want to clean off my sword today.”

Gelethys grins good-naturedly, waves, and heads off further into Riften. She finds the Bee and Barb as the sun sinks towards the horizon, and finds the only person with remotely red hair sitting in the corner. It’s of course entirely possible that Maul sent her straight into a trap, but for now she’s going to choose to believe this’ll actually pan out.

She slides into the seat across from him, says simply, “Maul sent me? Tall, big sword, not too much substance in the old mushroom tower?”

“Sure sounds like him.” Red strokes his chin thoughtfully. The action almost conceals a snicker. “Never done an honest day's work in your life for all that coin you're carrying, eh lass?”

“Depends on your definition of honest, and I’ve done at least a couple, probably, somewhere! At some point,” Gele counters. She drops the offended act, and the hand she’s pressed mockingly to her chest, fairly quickly. “I’m surprised you noticed I still had some coin on me. Maul certainly didn’t.”

Carrying multiple coinpurses: modern problems require modern solutions. 

“He never did see the forest for the trees, or the lass for the coinpurse in this case.” Red extends a hand. “Name’s Brynjolf.”

“Gelethys. Gele to my friends.” She takes his hand, shakes it briefly. “Don’t suppose your organization’s recruiting at the moment?”

“Officially, no. Unofficially, have you seen how hard it is to put up flyers? But also, technically, no.” Brynjolf raises a hand to stop her from rising. “But, I’ve got a nice little job I could use another pair of hands for, and our guildmaster’s not very keen on assigning me help. It goes well, you get half my pay, and I’ll put in a good word for you. It doesn’t… well lass, let’s hope for your sake it does.”

“Oh, it will. I won’t be the one dropping the ball.”

“Cocky, are we?”

“I’ve got the skills to back that up. You’ll see.” Her red eyes almost glimmer, reflecting the candlelight back out at the world. She smiles, holds his gaze, and eventually says, “What’s the plan?”

Gele’s always been good at going unnoticed, when she wants to. The issue is that she doesn’t often want to, or care enough to try. Going unnoticed is easy. Making sure the people who matter somewhere know her name is a whole lot harder. But she’ll get there.

Going unnoticed translates fairly easily into sneaking about, essential if you want to pick a pocket or snatch a trinket. In this case, her part of the job is a mix of both. Or would be, if Gelethys hadn’t raised an eyebrow and started asking questions. Now it’s just to put a warning into someone’s pocket, without them noticing her or the note until she’s well away.

Easier said than done, that. Brynjolf’s part of the job is, admittedly, important as well. But it’s far less difficult to cause a distraction, and he fetching well knows that.

Gelethys supposes she should feel grateful to get half the pay. She doesn’t, but she at least knows better than to cause a stink with her one opening to the local guild. Brynjolf’s at least less overtly threatening than Maul, who throws her a glare when she heads out of the cornerclub—okay, fine , tavern. Skyrim’s weird.

It’s weird in at least one good way, though. Skyrim’s guild doesn’t have anywhere near the bite of the Camonna Tong back home, and that is absolutely a good thing. If this was the Camonna Tong, she would have been stabbed at least twice by now.

Gelethys likes not being stabbed.

There’s also the strange, almost-familiarity, but as Gelethys crosses the central plaza, she chalks it up to growing up in Mournhold. A city’s leadership puppeted by someone behind the scenes? All sorts of illegal guarshit going on in plain sight? If there’s anything in the sewers—if there even are sewers, who knows—she’ll just start calling this city Skyrim’s Mournhold and call it a day.

She makes a show of looking around for someone to buy time, lets her lip curl in visible distaste as Brynjolf starts loudly advertising some scummy elixir that could be fermented strider piss for all Gelethys cares. He can’t honestly think anyone believes his guarshit, can he? He’s being watched by the local shopkeepers and others, not out of any genuine interest, but out of pity.

Attention’s attention. A distraction’s a distraction, and she can’t deny its effectiveness even if she wants to. Brand-Shei is leaning up against a stack of crates, a single pocket tantalizingly near the gap between them.

She ducks and rolls behind one stall, then another, and finally behind the crates. Brand-Shei’s dunmer like her, looking distinctly unimpressed but at least vaguely curious to see where Brynjolf’s even going with this guarshit. He’s got a weird name for a dunmer, actually, but Gelethys isn’t about to waste time thinking about that.

Instead, she finds the folded paper in her pocket. Slips her hand between the boxes, careful to open the nearest pocket of his, and oh-so-gently slides the paper in.

Objective: complete. If Brand-Shei is smart, he’ll watch his back from now on and not piss off whoever it was he pissed off, although Gele would put money on it having something to do with Maven Black-Briar. If he’s not, Gele is reasonably confident she can pull off the original objective, and a few days sitting in jail is still a much better alternative than dying.

All Gele has to do now is get out without being seen and connected to this. Still in a careful crouch, she sneaks back, around the stone wall surrounding the plaza. A quick look around reveals nobody’s looking her way. Slowly, carefully, she stands.

Brynjolf’s eyes are on her almost immediately. She winks in return, and heads back to the Bee and Barb. No sense sticking around the scene of the crime, that’s a sure way to get caught.

Once inside, she orders a drink and slides back into the same seat she’d occupied before. Brynjolf’s not far behind.

“Not bad, lass, not bad at all.” Under the table, he passes a half-full coinpurse to her. “I’d almost say you’re a natural.”

“Not exactly new to this,” Gelethys says. 

She raises her mug to her lips, only to find that mead does not taste at all the way she expected it to. It’s kind of disgusting, actually. She sets down her mug, wipes off her lips to hide her grimace. She doesn’t think she fooled Brynjolf, but it’s always, always worth a shot.

She’ll like mead eventually. It’ll just have to be an acquired taste.

“I gathered that much,” Brynjolf observes. “So why here?”

“The locals where I grew up recruit when the Serpent eclipses Masser and Secunda both. They might have gotten new members a good half-century ago, and they don’t exactly take kindly to upcoming cut-purses and pick-pockets.”

Brynjolf makes a noise of surprising understanding. “You wouldn’t be the only one, from what I’ve heard. Got a couple mates who came for similar reasons.”

“So. You’ll talk with the boss?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says, which is absolutely no guarantee at all and he knows it. 

“You do that, then. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Is that a promise, or a threat?”

“Ideally, a promise.” She grins, raises her mug to her lips again, manages not to gag quite as much at the taste this time. “I like Riften. I’d hate to have to leave so soon.”

“Lass, I said I’ll see what I can do.” Brynjolf sighs. “If it was up to me, you’d be in right now, no questions asked.”

Gelethys chokes on her mead. She blinks rapidly, coughs into her arm a few times, looks at Brynjolf with wide eyes. “Sorry. What?”

“Technique could use some refinement, but technique gets you nowhere if you don’t have the basics, and you’ve got those and a little more. So you’d be in already, if it was up to me. Which it’s not. And Mercer is… Mercer.”

“That your boss?” Gelethys gets a nod. “Sounds like a soulsick scuttlehead.”

“He is not ... Well, okay, maybe a little, assuming you’re saying what I think you’re saying, not exactly fluent in dunmeri slang. Guessing you’re from Morrowind.”

“What gave it away?”

“Accent. Couldn’t say exactly where from. Stonefalls?”

“Close, Deshaan. You know, if you’d rather, I could always use the much more universal term of asshole.”

“Mmm.” Brynjolf clears his throat. “He is, maybe, somewhat one of those. But don’t let him hear you saying that. Definitely not if you want into the Guild.”

“Oh, please, I have some common sense. Contrary to popular belief.”

“Actually, maybe just don’t open your mouth at all when you’re dealing with him.”

“Hey! Listen, I see your point, but just because I’ll accept it doesn’t mean I’ll agree with it.”

Brynjolf lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Tell you what. You make it to the Ragged Flagon in one piece, and I’ll put in a good word for you. Can’t promise more than that.”

“Ragged Flagon, huh? Not the strangest name for a cornerclub I’ve heard. Where is it, the sewers or something?”

“How,” Brynjolf says slowly, “in Oblivion did you know that?”

“Huh.” Gelethys blinks. “I didn’t, actually, although that would explain why this city seems so familiar.”

She gets a raised eyebrow and a vague gesture to continue, so she does. “I’m from Mournhold. You don’t ask what’s in the sewers, you ask what isn’t in the sewers, and assume everything else is.”

“Never been to Mournhold myself, lass.” Brynjolf shrugs easily. “You’ll have to tell me how our sewers compare. Assuming, of course, you make it through them.”

Gelethys smiles. “I’ll give you a head start.”

Gelethys hadn’t planned to give Brynjolf that long of a head start. On the other hand, she hadn’t planned on encountering a heavily armored woman sitting on a bench with her head buried in her hands, either.

Sure, she could just keep walking. But why would she? Instead, she takes a seat on the bench next to the woman and says, cautiously, “Hello.”

The woman starts. “Oh, hello. You’re a stranger here too?”

“Gelethys,” she says with a nod.

“Mjoll. If you’re not from around here… take a tired warrior’s advice. Leave while you still can.”

That… was not what she was expecting to hear, but she nods despite herself. “Any particular reason why, or…?”

“The Thieves Guild.”

Unconsciously, Gelethys scoots a bit further away from Mjoll. “Ah.”

Mjoll, however, isn’t done. “They represent everything that’s wrong with this city. They’re the worst kind of people. The Dark Brotherhood at least has a code. The Thieves Guild, well… I heard they murdered their own guildmaster, back before I arrived here.”

“That’s… honestly, still not as bad as the Camonna Tong back home,” Gelethys admits despite herself.

Mjoll snorts. “Really? Remind me never to go to Morrowind, then.”

“Never go to Morrowind, Mjoll,” Gelethys says immediately, obediently, and quite seriously. “It’s a mess.”

“Right now? I didn’t—” Mjoll actually laughs this time. “I like you, Gelethys. Thanks. I needed that today.”

“No problem. So, out of curiosity, what did the Thieves Guild do? To you, specifically. You’ve got too much of a grudge for them to not have done something.”

“It wasn’t to me. But it was definitely retaliation because of me.” Mjoll sighs. “A good friend of mine, Aerin, is stuck in prison for stealing a case of Black-Briar Mead. Thing is, he’s not a thief, and the guards have no evidence that it was him. Neither of us even drink Black-Briar Mead. But it’s Maven’s word against ours.”

“Maven… Black-Briar,” Gelethys guesses. “I’ve heard about her.”

“I bet. The Thieves Guild are all her yes-men. They do her dirty work, and the guards are paid off to ignore it all. I take back what I said about the Thieves Guild. They’re not the worst. She is. And I know she’s behind it because she asked me about Aerin in the market today.”

“Sounds like a regular h’lah,” Gelethys mutters. “I… might have an idea. If she’s behind it, she would know where the case actually is. If she’s the type I think she might be, she’d be too greedy to just destroy the evidence. She’ll have hidden it somewhere so she can sell it off once the smoke clears. If we can find it… I don’t know.”

“No, keep going. You’re onto something. The official report said that they’d found the case in his house, with all the bottles empty. If you can find the case, and there’s still a few unopened bottles in it…”

“That’ll put some serious holes in her story. Maven’s not officially in charge of the city, is she? How’s the…” Gelethys searches her brain for the right word. “Jarl.”

“Jarl Laila believes the Thieves Guild is being taken care of when it clearly isn’t. But, if we provide proof that her own city guard framed him… she might actually listen. It wouldn’t be our word against Maven.”

On the one hand: Gelethys would like to join the Thieves Guild. On the other: Maven Black-Briar sounds like she could use a good kick in the dress robes, Mjoll is pretty, and if Gelethys isn’t the one who turns the new evidence in, there’ll be no connection between her and this.

“As long as you turn said evidence in and leave my name out of it,” Gelethys says finally. She stands up and offers Mjoll a hand. The other woman takes it. “Do you think they’d be stupid enough to leave the case in the guardhouse?”

“Quite possibly,” Mjoll says in return. “They’re used to getting away with anything and everything. The hard part is going to be getting into the guardhouse.”

“Leave that to me.”

The guards were, in fact, stupid enough to leave the case in the guardhouse. The hard part is, then, getting it out of the guardhouse and to Mjoll, waiting in front of the Jarl’s palace. But Gelethys manages.

“You actually found it,” Mjoll breathes. “Thank you. Are you sure you don’t want to come in with me?”

“Not today. I don’t want to oppose Maven publicly, even if she sounds like an ash-blighted fiend. I have some… things I’d like to do, that’ll become much harder if I go in with you now.”

“Very well. I understand.”

Somehow, Gelethys doubts that Mjoll would be as understanding if she clarified exactly what her plans in Riften were. So she stays quiet, for now. If she’s learned anything from her time spent evading the Tong, it’s that allies within the law never hurt.

And Gelethys does, despite herself, like Mjoll.

“Thank you.” She offers Mjoll a smile. “I’d best be going.”

“Of course. If you need a warrior by your side… or if you simply need somewhere to stay. Once Aerin knows what you’ve done, he’ll feel the same way I do.”

Gele’s grin turns slightly uneasy. “Please keep it between yourself and Aerin, if you have to tell anyone.”

Mjoll nods. “Safe travels, my friend.” 

With that, she hefts the case under one arm, and pulls open the door to Mistveil Keep with her free hand. Gelethys watches her go, lingers there for a long moment, and then goes looking for a way down to the sewers.

“Ah, hello lass,” Brynjolf greets. “Perfect timing. How was the Ratway?”

Gelethys walks around a pool of water to what she assumes is the Ragged Flagon. She sheathes her sword as she draws nearer, and resists the urge to comment on the name of the place. After all, her ata works at a place called the Winged Guar. Compared to that, the Ragged Flagon is downright normal.

“Underwhelming, to be completely honest,” Gelethys admits.

A silver-haired woman leaning against the railing makes an offended noise. “The Ratway? Underwhelming? Did the last set of squatters move out or something?”

“No, they were still there.” She puts a heavy emphasis on the were, and adds, “Hope they weren’t friends of yours.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Last few ‘recruits’ Bryn sent through there didn’t make it here at all,” says the man wiping down the bar. “So what’s different about you?”

“I don’t scare easily. Certainly not from would-be bandits or diseased skeevers.” Gelethys laughs. “I grew up in Mournhold. You hiding a lich or two in the closet? Some dwemer automatons in the basement?”

“No?”

“Cute. Mournhold is definitely worse.”

After an only slightly awkward pause, Brynjolf clears his throat. “Like I said—it’s not her skills I’m worried about. It’s her pissing off Mercer.”

“Eh, I made it in. He hasn’t tried to kill me yet.” Silver considers this for a moment and adds, “Not intentionally, anyway. Don’t think any of us were expecting Goldenglow.”

“Goldenglow?” Gelethys echoes.

“Nothing you need to worry about.” She sounds almost defensive. Not without reason—it occurs to Gelethys, suddenly, that she’s favoring her right leg.

“You got it.”

“Anyway,” Brynjolf says pointedly, “this is Vex—” He nods to Silver. “—and Vekel.”

“Gelethys. Gele works.” She musters up a wave and an only slightly nervous grin. “Like what you’ve done with the place. Decorating options in prime sewer real estate are pretty limited, I’d imagine.”

Brynjolf snorts. “Please just stay quiet when I take you to Mercer.”

“Why? Does he not have a sense of humor or something?”

Vex’s cough sounds almost like a hastily whispered nonotreally.

“That sounds horrible,” Gelethys says emphatically. “I feel so bad for him. Although I’m kind of curious what it’s like to live like that. Not quite curious enough to try it out myself though.”

Brynjolf looks at Vex. Vex looks at Brynjolf. Vekel mutters, “I’m staying out of this,” and retreats to behind the bar.

“Maybe we should send you to deal with something else first, lass,” Brynjolf says faintly. “How do you feel about debt collection?”

As it turns out, Gelethys feels rather horrible about debt collection, particularly when it’s clear that it’s less about owing the Thieves Guild money and more about outright extortion. Keerava’s barely keeping her inn afloat as is. Bersi and Haelga are just trying their best. None of them are rich, nor particularly mean.

For her part, Gelethys suspects she knows perfectly well why the Guild is after people who really don’t need any help having a hard life: Maven Black-Briar. She’d cover their debts herself, if she could. Unfortunately, between all the coin she can scrape together, she’s nearly a hundred septims short.

In retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have listened to what Louis Letrush had to offer. On the other hand, Gele’s opinion of Maven Black-Briar only dips lower the more she learns about her, and it shouldn’t be too terribly hard. That’s why Gelethys slips into the jail and resists the urge to deck Sibbi Black-Briar in his smug, womanizing bastard of a face.

That’s why she finds Mjoll late at night and says, altogether too cheerfully, “How do you feel about stealing Maven’s horse?”

Mjoll looks at her. Blinks tiredly. “Did you just break into Aerin’s house?”

“I didn’t break the lock, don’t worry about it, also from what I’ve heard around town is it really just Aerin’s at this point?” Gelethys waves a hand dismissively. “Like I said, don’t worry about it. What do you think?”

“I think,” Mjoll says, “that I must be still asleep, because you can’t possibly have suggested what I think you just suggested.”

Gelethys leans forward and pinches her on the arm.

“Ow!” Mjoll rubs it.

“Not dreaming,” Gelethys says. “Want to rob Maven? I’m reasonably certain I can cover our tracks well enough, and if not we’ll have you to deal with her mercenaries. Can’t go tattling back to the local mead empress if they’re dead. I have it on good authority that they’re basically hired bandits anyway. Also I’m willing to split the pay with you halfway, or even more than halfway, I just need exactly ninety-six septims.”

“That is an oddly specific amount.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gelethys says for the third time.

“The more you say that, the more I do worry about it. You want to steal Maven’s horse?”

“Yep! I mean, I’m going to do it regardless, and somehow I can’t see you running to tell her who did it after the fact even if you don’t feel like helping. Want to come?”

Somehow, Gelethys gets the feeling that Mjoll’s long-suffering sigh isn’t going to be followed by a no. It might also be the first of many. She’s got a good feeling about that.

“I’ll get Aerin to cover for me,” Mjoll says at last. “I took a bounty from Jarl Laila the other day and haven’t gotten around to actually doing it yet, mainly because of the whole Maven thing, but as long as we go there on the way back…”

“Sounds like a plan. Bandits?”

“Bandits.”

“Count me in for sure.” Gelethys bounces on her feet. “If you hate thieves, bandits are even worse. They want to be thieves with none of the effort. Or the training. Or the gear, or even a alit’s tail of common sense.”

“Got that right. Out of curiosity, why do you need exactly ninety-eight septims?”

“Ninety-six,” Gelethys corrects gently. “Don’t worry about it.”

Bringing Mjoll, or another warrior of similar skill, is clearly the right move. Between the two of them, they make short work of the mercenaries, are essentially able to walk out with Frost the rather temperamental horse, and the horse and new owner are out of Skyrim entirely within the hour. 

Gelethys takes exactly ninety-six septims of Letrush’s pay. Mjoll gets the rest, and they circle around to hit the bandits at Faldar’s Tooth before returning to Riften from there. They get drinks at the Bee and Barb before parting ways—mead is still not quite a taste Gele’s acquired—and Gelethys is more than happy to pass out for several hours before getting back to her Guild business.

She hadn’t taken much from Maven’s lodge or her manor in town, because while she might be impulsive, Gelethys isn’t stupid or suicidal. There’s no doubt Maven will be looking for whoever broke in, and selling off shit that matches a description of what’s been stolen would be a great way to have to flee the country all over again.

What she did take, however, was the contents of Maven’s safe. The lineage papers Letrush had wanted were in there, but Gelethys didn’t bother looking for those specifically until she’d gotten out of the lodge. Now that she’s in the clear, and significantly less sleep-deprived, she can look through the rest more thoroughly.

Most of the papers aren’t particularly interesting. Contracts, business deals, the odd note involving the Black Sacrament and a woman named Astrid—okay, maybe that last one is interesting if not slightly terrifying. A more apt description would be that most of Maven’s papers aren’t particularly interesting to Gelethys herself.

But some of them are. There’s a payment to someone called Drahff to camp out in the Ratway and kill anyone who tries to come through, funding for a group called the Summerset Shadows near Windhelm, something about Cidhna Mine? Where the hell even is Cidhna Mine? What would Maven want with a mine?

Most concerning of all is the book of expenses for several years back, and on the surface it seems like nothing particularly important. Out of curiosity, Gelethys flips back to her birth year. 4E 176. There’s the month, and nothing interesting happened on her birthday.

But nearly a week earlier, on the 7th of Last Seed, is a record of payment, more coin than Gele’s ever seen in one place, and a handwritten note: for Gallus.

Gelethys stares at it for a long moment, but the name Gallus—at least she’s pretty sure it’s a name—doesn’t ring any bells. 

Still. She can’t exactly put Maven’s papers back. She might as well try and figure out who Gallus was. Or maybe is? Sure, Maven might have had him killed if he crossed her, but he could still be alive. But who is he?

And why in Oblivion was Maven paying him that much money?

Chapter Text

“Hey, Keerava,” Gelethys says quietly, with a quick glance in the direction of the other patrons. “You got a minute?”

There aren’t a lot of people up and about at this time of morning, and frankly Gelethys would prefer not being up this early herself, but business is business. Just one of the local Nords with a hard on for Talos nursing a mead in the corner, and Talen-Jei (Keerava’s… boyfriend? possibly?) sweeping up in the other one.

“Of course.” The pale-scaled Argonian continues to wipe down a tankard. “What can I get for you?”

“Nothing, at the moment, thank you. It’s more…” Gelethys tries to think of a way to bridge the topic delicately, but barring that, better to just get it over with. “Heard you were in trouble with the Thieves Guild.”

Keerava stops wiping the tankard. “Where did you hear that?”

“Uh, around. What did you do?”

“What’s it to you?” Her eyes narrow. She glares at the tankard in her hand, sets it down behind the counter, and starts to wipe down another one. “I may have told Brynjolf to jump off the pier.”

Gelethys can’t stop herself from laughing, at least a little. “Damn. I bet the look on his face was glorious.”

“It was. He looked like he’d choked on wamasu piss,” Keerava admits wryly. But she soon sobers up and says, “You’re one of his, aren’t you?”

“I mean, I’d like to be.” She holds up a hand before Keerava can start yelling at her and adds, “I just don’t see the point in outright extortion.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” she lowers her voice further, “I’m going to cover it. Just this once. Act like you paid, and I’ll do my best to keep the others off your back for a while. Maybe longer.”

The Argonian’s eyes only narrow further. “Why?”

“You want the nice answer, or the realistic one?” The unimpressed stare Gelethys gets makes it pretty clear which answer she wants. “Fine. It’s fucking stupid to rob people who don’t have much to take, from a completely logical standpoint. It’s also just mean for the sake of being mean. If I wanted to do that, I would have joined up with bandits or something. I’ve got standards.”

“More standards than most of your ‘guildmates’ do.” Keerava sounds, perhaps, more than a little bitter. “Fine. Get out.”

“...sorry?”

“You think I’d let you stay around in here, gloating, after you took my money? You thought wrong. Out.” Softer, Keerava adds, “I erect the spine of gratitude. This never happened.”

“Course not,” Gelethys agrees. “Be seeing you.”

Haelga is far straighter than a devotee of Dibella has any business being, but she accepts Gele’s offer without complaint. Bersi calls her a blessing from Mara, and Gelethys has to resist the urge to say no, she’s a blessing from an entirely different goddess if anything.

In the end, though, Brynjolf had said it didn’t matter where the coin came from, so long as the message got across. And Gelethys rather thinks it did. You don’t piss people off, they’ll be a lot more willing to look the other way when you need somewhere to hide. That’s how she got her third girlfriend.

Ex-girlfriend now, she supposes. It’s better that Ivresa doesn’t know what happened to her or where she went. Gele’s dads can handle themselves if the Tong comes a-knocking, and both of them are very good at lying for obvious, religion-related reasons, but Ivresa… Gelethys couldn’t do that to her.

Finished with counting out the coin, Brynjolf nods, satisfied. “Job’s done and you brought the gold. Best of all, you did it clean. Wasn’t sure you’d be able to handle that last bit.”

Gelethys rolls her eyes. “Please. What does killing people accomplish?”

“Speaking my language, lass. You’d be surprised how many people around here don’t get that.”

“Not really. Surprised, that is. Dead people don’t make money.”

“Exactly,” Brynjolf says emphatically. “Thank you! You wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve had to drill that into lately. If you want to kill people, go join the Brotherhood or a group of bandits. If you want to be a real thief, you don’t do that.”

“But of course, people want the immediate payoff over the potential of more coin in the future. Speaking of which,” Gelethys gestures vaguely at what she’s given to Brynjolf. “Do I get any of that, or…?”

Brynjolf scoots about a third of the coin over to her. “There’s more where that came from, if you keep it up.”

“No if about it.” Besides Vekel wiping down the bar, the Ragged Flagon’s deserted aside from Gelethys and Brynjolf. “So, where’s the secret entrance?”

Brynjolf raises an eyebrow. “What makes you think there’s a secret entrance to the rest of the Guild, lass?”

“I’ve been further in the Ratway. No sign of any Guild activities there. Or really much of anything, actually. Not to mention? There’s no way everyone’s out and about except you, it’s the middle of the day.”

“Observant, are we lass?”

“Also,” Gelethys adds cheekily, “I never said what I thought the secret entrance was to.”

Guildmaster Mercer Frey turns out to be a middle-aged Breton with a stick up his ass the size of Red Mountain before the Red Year. Gelethys, for her part, likes him right up until he opens his mouth.

“Do I make myself clear?” Mercer asks.

“Course, I understand,” Gelethys says briskly. “Don’t fuck up, don’t talk back, don’t get caught ‘cause I won’t get bailed out, yada yada yada. You know, I liked you a lot more before you started talking. Almost attractive for a man.”

Behind Mercer, Brynjolf smacks a hand to his forehead.

“I’ll let that comment go because you’re new here, and because Brynjolf here has assured me you’ll be nothing but a benefit to our organization.”

“Oh, I will be. You’ll see.”

“Learn to keep your mouth shut, and maybe you will be.”

“You know, does that really matter? As long as I’m doing my job and doing it well—”

“Lass, please shut up,” Brynjolf says wearily.

Gelethys shuts up. 

“I’ll use smaller words this time, so even you can understand,” Mercer says. When Gelethys doesn’t rise to the bait (this time) he continues, “You play by the rules, you walk away rich. You break the rules, you lose your share. No talking back, no arguing. You do what we say, when we say. Do I make myself clear?”

“As crystal,” Gelethys mutters.

She bites back a comment about just what else Mercer has made clear until she’s well out of Mercer’s earshot. Then, after she’s gotten her nice new guild armor from the fence and a tankard of mead, she mutters something particularly profane involving a herd of guars, Hermaeus Mora, and stale saltrice.

“Holy shit,” Vex all but wheezes. “I’m remembering that one. We’ll have a problem if you’re that good in other things.”

“Like what, in bed?” Gelethys asks.

The fence, a raven-haired, dark-skinned woman called Tonilia, snort-coughs into her mead. 

To Vex’s credit, she just raises an eyebrow and says in return, “Well, are you?”

“Want to find out?”

“If you’re as competent as you’re confident,” and one side of Vex’s mouth quirks up in a sly grin, “I’ll consider it.”

Across the bar, a balding man in the same senior leathers as Vex mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like the words are you serious, but isn’t quite loud enough to be sure. He stands, makes his way over, and offers a hand to Gelethys.

“Delvin. I handle the half of the small jobs our lovely Vex here doesn’t. Charmed.” He sounds a little more strained than charmed, but Gelethys takes his hand anyway and shakes it firmly. No point in pissing people off who are at least making a passing attempt at being polite.

“Delvin,” Vex says flatly, “she swings for the other team and then some.”

That, Delvin doesn’t seem particularly annoyed about. “Well, yes, but you don’t—”

“I swing both ways. Violently, with my dagger, where you’re concerned.”

“I’m well aware,” Delvin mutters, and oh dear sacred lady Almalexia they have a history. “I’ll just be over here. If you feel like picking up some extra work with a more personal touch.”

“He means pickpocketing,” Vex translates as he walks off. “For the most part. You know, I might have given him a chance if he’d actually take responsibility for his fuck-ups. But nope! It’s some bloody curse.”

“Curse?” Gelethys asks. Upon receiving a glare from the white-haired woman, she raises her hands and says, “Hey, I’m just curious, not saying I agree with it. Particularly not when I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s bullshit is what it is! But I’ll be quieter about it cause I don’t want Delvin back over here anytime in the next few hours. He says the Guild’s luck has been all kinds of shitty since the guy before Mercer died. Well, yeah, of course it has, Mercer’s just not—hi Bryn—a good leader!”

“I’d ask you if you were willing to say that to his face, but somehow I get the feeling you already have,” Brynjolf mutters. “And not just because I’m the one who has to smooth things over with him when something pisses him off.”

Vex shrugs carelessly. “What can I say? I’m too good for him to kick out and he knows it. Pull up a chair, Bryn, you can explain Delvin’s ‘curse’ better than I can and you’re less superstitious.”

Brynjolf doesn’t pull up a chair. Instead, he says, “Got to borrow the new lass for a moment.”

“Sure, okay, I’ll be here.”

Gelethys follows Brynjolf to a quieter corner of the Flagon and raises an eyebrow when he turns around. “So how much trouble am I in?”

“Can you turn invisible?” Brynjolf asks.

“Are you—okay, you’re serious. Not consistently and not for more than a few seconds at a time. Why?”

“How about walk through walls?”

“I— what?”

“Fight a heavily-armed mercenary company about thirty strong at once?”

“At once, no, but—”

“Then you need to get out of Riften, and fast.”

Gelethys just stares at him for a long moment. Eventually, she manages to get out the words, “On second thought, I’d be willing to test my luck with the thirty mercenaries. Would I be allowed to use explosions?”

“Nothing that can destabilize the building.”

“That can be arranged. Probably.” Gelethys hesitates and says, after thinking on it a bit longer, “Really, though, what’s the issue? I’d be able to come up with something much more concrete if you quit giving me hypotheticals and told me what I had to do.”

“Goldenglow.”

Name rings a bell. A small one. “Isn't that the reason Vex was limping earlier?”

Brynjolf sighs. “Yeah. Bee farm, outside Riften a ways, you might have seen it on your way in. It’s on an island, middle of Lake Honrich. Used to provide the honey for Black-Briar Meadery.”

“There’s honey in mead? And it tastes that bad? How do they fuck up honey that badly?”

“I… don’t know but that really is the least of your problems right now. The mer in charge of Goldenglow, Aringoth, kicked the Guild out, refused to provide anything to Maven, and hired a bunch of mercenaries to keep everyone out. Vex is our best infiltrator, and she barely escaped in one piece. We’d been planning to send her back in once she recovered and they’d let their guard down.”

“Right. What does that have to do with me?”

“Mercer—”

“—has a stick up his—”

“—didn’t appreciate you talking back to him. Which I did try to warn you about, but you took that warning and threw it to the trolls.” Brynjolf gives Gelethys a pointed glare. “I managed to talk him into giving you a chance to prove yourself, but if I’d known he’d have you go in there…”

“It can’t be that bad.” Gelethys considers this and amends, “Okay, it can be that bad. But I’m in if I pull it off?”

“You’re in if you pull it off. All we really need you to do is to get in, figure out what caused Aringoth’s sudden change in tune, and get out with evidence. Anything else is secondary.” Brynjolf hesitates. “If you can pull that much off, forget Mercer, you’ll be a legend around here. But I can’t stress this enough, lass, you’re not supposed to succeed.”

“I kinda figured that out already, but confirmation is nice. I’ve got some ideas. Anything else I need to know while I’m here, or…?”

“Nothing related to Goldenglow, necessarily, and I thought I was imagining it earlier but I’m sure not now. Lass, are you aware—”

“Yes, I promise I’m well aware.” Gelethys rolls her eyes. There will come a day when people stop asking about it, but that day sure hasn’t come now. It’s not like she’s missing an arm or something. “It’s my shadow, I think I’d have noticed by now.”

“Right.” Brynjolf clears his throat uneasily. “You have any idea why, or…?”

“Misread the instructions for making an invisibility potion,” Gelethys says easily. “Anything else?”

Brynjolf did not have any other questions relating to Goldenglow or Gele’s notable lack of something most people have. His advice for dealing with Goldenglow still was, of course, ‘get the fuck out while you still can.’

That isn’t an option. So, Gelethys goes back to Vex.

“If I were you, I’d go at night, go for the sewers,” Vex offers. “There’s a loose grate on the shore of the north side of the island, goes right up to the main house.”

“And the mercs don’t know about it?”

“If they did, I wouldn’t be here. Might still be some skeevers down there. So be careful. Hey, Bryn said he told you to just not bother and leave—”

“Obviously I’m not doing that,” Gelethys says firmly. “And too many people have tried to kill me for someone to succeed now.”

Vex makes a pleased noise. “Good. We could use more actually competent people around here. So long as you don’t try to replace me—”

Gelethys snorts. “Please. If I wanted to replace you, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be trying. Give me a sec…” 

Purple, dubiously legal magic dances across her fingers as she focuses. Better to cast it now than forget entirely and wind up back in Mournhold where a lot more people want her dead.

“Casting a muffle already?”

Gelethys shakes her head. “Mark spell. You’ll see how it works if things go to guarshit. Think I’ve got a couple hours until sunset. Plenty of time to plan things.”

Approximately three hours later, Gelethys reappears in the seat opposite Vex with a flash of purple light and an audible pop!

“Hi,” Gelethys greets like she isn’t breathing heavily. “So funny story. They definitely know about the sewers now if they didn’t already, half the island stinks of charred skeever meat now.”

“So they had traps down there,” Vex concludes like the other girl didn’t just teleport in out of nowhere. “Lovely.”

“I mean, I think they’ve all either been disabled or set off now, but also they’ll be watching the sewers a lot more closely. Probably think I’m still down there. Or maybe I got lucky and they think some of the skeevers set them off.”

“Doubt it. So, while you’re here…”

“Technically, it’s two different spells. Mark’s the one I used to determine where I’d show up, and then I used Recall before the third oil slick exploded in my face to come back to the location I set with Mark. Pretty useful, pretty illegal in Skyrim since one of the things the Thalmor banned was an entire school of magic.”

“But this is Stormcloak territory, the Thalmor have as little a presence here as they do further east, and do I look like I care if it’s legal?” Vex absolutely does not look like she cares if it’s legal. “Teach me.”

“Gladly, after I deal with Goldenglow.” Gelethys looks around the Flagon. “Hey, where is everyone?”

“Out on jobs or something. Vekel’s taking a nap while nobody’s here, Tonilia went to go pay her Khajiit friends outside Riften a visit. You sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow night, try until tomorrow?”

“Want to, yes. Will I? No. I’ll let you know what the plan is when it succeeds.” After she gets up she adds, dismissively, “Or if it fails, but I’m feeling good about this one.”

Gelethys recalls again at nearly midnight, looking slightly singed but otherwise none the worse for wear. “It was going great until one of them threw a torch at me.”

“What the fuck?” Vex asks, quite reasonably.

“Exactly! At least use a fireball or something! That, I would have been able to block with a ward. Or at least try to. Projectiles are a bit harder. Especially if they’re not meant to be projectiles. How was I supposed to know that s’wit was going to throw an entire torch?”

“You lost me at ward,” Vex says dryly. “No, you don’t need to explain what that is, all I care about are the spells that apparently let you teleport out of danger.”

“Mark and Recall,” Gelethys supplies. “Another one of the more useful banned things is levitation. Not that it ever stopped House Telvanni when Morrowind was part of the Empire.”

“Think I’ll pass on that.”

“Good choice, it can be pretty dangerous if you run out of magicka in the air. Not that it ever stopped… um, never mind. Third time’s the charm! I’m feeling really good about this one.”

It’s nearly dawn when Gelethys pops back in, muttering something about Aringoth being descended from Daedra on both sides of his family and somehow managing to inherit none of the good points from either.

“Am I allowed to kill him?” Gelethys asks once she’s done.

“Sadly, no,” Vex replies. “If it’s any consolation, Maven isn’t known for leaving people who cross her alive.”

“I… will keep that in mind.”

Maybe Gelethys had better keep a closer eye on Mjoll from now on. She’d rather not have her turn up dead. And honestly, that would have been good to know before she’d agreed to help steal Maven’s horse, but Louis Letrush is probably dead somewhere in Morrowind by now, she hadn’t given him her name, and at that point in time there was nothing connecting her with the Guild.

“So. What’s your latest elaborate plan? And while we’re at it, is it just me, or—”

“Not just you, guar piss is corrosive,” Gelethys says immediately. “As for the plan… Sneaking in through the sewers didn’t work, shooting fireballs at them from the shadows would have worked if I was better at casting quietly, and he’s got even more mercenaries in his house than the rest of the complex combined.” 

She thinks on this for a long moment. Eventually, the mer throws her hands up in the air. “You know what? Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.”

“Which is?”

Gelethys pulls out a magicka fortification potion, chugs it, and says, “More fireballs.”

It takes all the coin Gelethys can scrounge up and then some, but by mid-morning she’s put together exactly five hundred septims. She’ll just have to skip breakfast, and possibly lunch if this takes a while.

But sneaking didn’t work, fireballs while sneaking didn’t work, so now it’s time for a frontal assault, ideally with more fireballs and less stealth. Stealth isn’t exactly going to work well in broad daylight, after all.

The mercenaries know that just as well as Gelethys does. So they’ll be expecting her to try again at night, when she’ll have an advantage. They certainly won’t be expecting this.

Of course, judging by the incredulous look her own newly-hired mercenary is giving her, nobody else is expecting this either.

“So… let me get this straight,” says the mercenary who had called himself a master of the arcane and yet only wore apprentice robes.

“Nothing about this is straight,” Gelethys says automatically.

“Obviously, but not what I meant.” Marcurio sighs. “So your employers—I’ll pretend I don’t know perfectly well who, the owner of Goldenglow approached me as well but I decided my talents were better spent elsewhere and also he wasn’t paying well at all—want you to find out why this Aringoth fellow suddenly kicked you out. Correct?”

“So far, yeah.”

“And your plan is to… sneak up to the roof of the building and rain fireballs on them from above?”

“The sun’s high enough in the sky that they’ll be blinded trying to counterattack, and you can never go wrong with more fire,” Gelethys says quite seriously. “Unfortunately I’m not allowed to burn the place to the ground and be done with it, and we’re not supposed to hit any of the beehives either. There’s more mercenaries inside, but once we’re done with the ones outside, I’ll head in, draw as many of them as I can to follow me, and you can take care of them as they chase me out. Any more questions?”

“You’re not at all worried about me hitting you?”

“Maybe a little. But I didn’t see a single Dunmer there, which means I can take hits from significantly more fireballs than any of them can. Anything else?”

“How did you lose your shadow?” Marcurio asks at last.

Gelethys doesn’t know why she’s surprised at this point. She really, really shouldn’t be. “Got struck by lightning. Didn’t die. Crazy Turdas.”

The mage eventually just nods. “Sure, okay. Is now a bad time to mention that today is Turdas?”

“You were gone a bit longer this time,” Vex observes. She doesn’t even flinch at Gele’s sudden appearance this time. “I’d ask if you were taking a nap, but you look a little… singed.”

“Probably because I am,” Gelethys agrees. “I need a drink.”

“So what’s the next plan? Seeing as more fire apparently didn’t work.”

“The next —no no no, it’s not…” Startled, Gelethys rummages in her pack before pulling out a few sheets of paper. “Don’t need a next plan. This one worked, and I think the only person there who didn’t get burnt to death was Aringoth himself. He didn’t give up very much.”

“That’s it?”

“Read it,” Gelethys says, and leaves to get some mead. When she comes back, the papers are sitting neatly in front of her seat, and Vex is giving her an incredulous look.

“You’d better show this to Bryn. Mercer too, I guess. None of us thought…” Vex lets out a long, low whistle. “I thought Aringoth just grew a spine at a really, really inconvenient time. ‘Far more bark than bite,’ huh? They’re not wrong, considering how utterly incompetent certain members are, not naming names but—”

“Hey!” Delvin protests. He peers over Vex’s shoulder as he passes by. “Whatcha got there?”

Without even looking, Vex backhands him and scoots away. “More to Goldenglow than we thought. No curse, just someone who isn’t fond of us, which could be anyone from that Mjoll woman to the innkeeper at the Bee and Barb, and that’s just in Riften.”

“Couldn’t be either of them. Neither of ‘em got the funds. Let me see that.”

Gelethys passes it over.

“So you do have a brain. Could have fooled me.”

“Very funny,” Delvin mutters in a tone that suggests he doesn’t find this—or the bill of sale—funny in the least. “Gods above and below, Mercer is not going to be happy to see this.”

“I don’t think he’ll be much happier to hear I survived,” Gelethys says wryly. She takes back the bill of sale and, standing, asks, “Either of you seen Brynjolf around?”

As it turns out, Brynjolf is off on a job with a couple of other rookie thieves. Seeing as the job is in Whiterun, he probably won’t be back for a good couple days. Good for him, but that means Gelethys has to bring the news directly to Mercer.

Could be worse.

The look on Mercer’s face when he sees Gelethys alive, well, and successful makes everything worth it.

Chapter Text

The bitter chill of winter has finally given way to the tentative warmth of spring on the day Gelethys formally meets Maven Black-Briar. Gelethys, for her part, is quite enjoying a reprieve from freezing her tits off. The Rift in winter might be warmer than Eastmarch, but that’s still not warm by any stretch of the word. Hence why she tends to layer under her guild leathers.

But, for once, it’s actually rather nice out. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and there’s actually some flowers growing in the old cemetery. Sure, they’re nightshade and deathbell, but they’re pretty nonetheless. Gelethys happens to like purple, and not just in flowers.

Soul gems, extremely useful for charging enchantments of any kind, are purple. Usually. The aforementioned flowers are purple, and besides being pretty they’re great for making potions besides poisons. Conjuration spells, bound weapons in particular, are purple—and it’s amazing how often people tend to assume she’s good at magic or swordplay, not both. Honestly, it’s like they’ve never heard of a spellsword.

Then, of course, there’s the ugly, painfully vivid maroon of the dress robes Maven Black-Briar is currently wearing.

Gelethys likes purple, but she’ll make an exception for that shade. She’s not about to tell Maven how hideous it looks, though. She’s perfectly happy to let her keep wearing something that looks like guar spit-up.

“So you’re the one who pulled off Goldenglow a few months back,” Maven says. “Hmm. You don’t look so impressive.”

“With all due respect, I’m not supposed to look impressive,” Gelethys points out. “I’d be missing the entire point if I did. I’m a thief. ”

“Keep your voice down,” the woman hisses. “Yes, obviously you’re a thief. But tell me, are you a good thief?”

“Depends on your definition of good. But let’s say yes, and skip the rest of the conversation.” Gelethys leans forward. The mead she’d brought up with her is left untouched. “You want me, specifically, for something. Why?”

“While your tactics at Goldenglow were very… shall we say, unorthodox,” Maven looks very much like she’d like to say something far less flattering, but doesn’t, “they got the job done. I’ve got another delicate operation. I don’t care how it gets done, so long as it gets done.”

“What’s the job?”

Maven smiles. Almalexia’s tits that’s unsettling. “Are you familiar with Honningbrew Meadery?”

“Heard the name before, but beyond that, not really. Couldn’t tell you where it is or what it does. Besides, presumably, brewing mead. Let me guess, you want me to eliminate your competition—”

“In a sense.”

“—because you can’t stand the idea of not having a monopoly over every mead-drinker in Skyrim, short of those who brew their own. And honestly you’d probably make homemade mead illegal if you could.”

“Perceptive,” Maven observes. “Not to mention full of yourself.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“I could have you thrown in the dungeons for life with a single snap of my fingers, if I wanted.”

“Bold of you to assume they’d be able to keep me there.” Gelethys clears her throat before Maven can continue their verbal pissing contest, likely by bringing up the Morag Tong or something similar, and says, “Really, though, we both know I’m more useful to you alive and not rotting away under Mistveil Keep. Don’t let my demeanor fool you: I am very good at what I do.”

“You’d better be, for talking to me like that . I’ve been informed you’re new to Riften, so I’ll let it slide for now. Do you even know who I am?”

“You’re Maven Black-Briar, aren’t you? I think your name alone says plenty about you.” Gelethys smiles crookedly. “Give me the details, and I’ll be on it before you can say ‘meadery.’”

Honningbrew Meadery consists of a couple of relatively new wooden buildings not far from the southern road to Whiterun, and conveniently enough the one Gelethys had planned to take to the city. 

Unfortunately, Gelethys is supposed to meet with Maven’s contact inside the city proper, and she’s supposed to meet with him before sunup. So she follows a group of heavily armored warriors all but carrying one of their own in, whistling under her breath and doing her best to look like one of the group herself, and then splits off to find wherever the Bannered Mare is after the fact.

It only occurs to her after she’s stepped inside the inn that one of them was wearing an almost familiar red cape. But she can’t turn around now. She’s got a job to do, and besides, what would Gael be doing as a petty sword for hire? He’s joined the Legion by now, no doubt. Couldn’t be him.

Nevertheless, it’s with a moderately heavy heart and a distinct feeling that she’s forgotten something important that she goes looking for whoever Mallus Maccius is. He isn’t exactly hard to identify, given that he’s jumpier than a silt strider in heat and pale enough that Gelethys would believe him if he said he’d had an adverse run-in with a vampire between Honningbrew and here.

“Are you sent by…?” Mallus asks wearily.

“No, obviously I came to talk to someone who looks ready to fall over at any moment for shits and giggles,” Gelethys retorts. “Yes, we’ve got a mutual… let’s say acquaintance, I don’t really want to call Maven Black-Briar a friend.”

“Who would?” Mallus visibly flinches at his own words. “Sorry. I didn’t… never mind. Job. Right. I’ll keep this quick because we’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it and if Sabjorn catches wind of where I am, it’s me who’ll pay for it.”

“Sabjorn is…?”

“Honningbrew’s owner. My current employer. The man Maven wants us to bring down.”

Mallus sounds about as happy about Maven as he does about Sabjorn, but he takes a deep breath and continues, “He’s holding a tasting for the local guard captain tomorrow at noon. We’re going to poison the mead and frame him for it.”

“Sounds simple enough,” which in Gele’s experience means she’s not getting all the details. “You have the poison, or do I need to make my own?”

Mallus, despite himself, grins weakly. “That’s the best part. Sabjorn’s going to give it to us. Well, you, because if I’m anywhere near Sabjorn before the tasting he’ll make me do everything instead of you. You’ll at least get paid.”

Okay, Gelethys is definitely not getting all the details, but where to even begin asking for more information? She settles on, “You don’t get paid?”

Wordlessly, Mallus takes a big gulp of mead. Black-Briar. Probably tastes as much like piss as the rest of the mead Gele’s tried.

“Made the mistake of borrowing coin from him, coin I couldn’t pay back,” Mallus says at last. “Instead of reporting me to the guard for not being able to pay, he’s ‘generously’ allowing me to pay it back by working for him. Not so bad on the surface, right?”

“How bad is it?” Gelethys isn’t sure she wants to know, to tell the truth.

“Bad. Really, really bad. The short version is no, I don’t get paid, and if I complain to anyone about it I get thrown in prison instead of the stingy bastard who wants his free labor.” He sighs. “From what I’ve heard about your… employer, she isn’t much better.”

“She’s not my employer,” Gelethys says immediately. “She’s probably just fucking mine, if the rumors have any substance to them. Why anyone would want to fuck either of them, I don’t know—”

“And I don’t want to know,” Mallus cuts in. “I really, really don’t.”

“Understandable, I wouldn’t either. So, I’m guessing the poison you’re referring to isn’t the mead itself?”

There’s something going on at the Temple of Kynareth despite the early hour of not-quite-morning, but as curious as Gelethys is, she’s not quite curious enough to check it out. She’s been traveling all night, and if she’s learned anything from Goldenglow, it’s that attempting to do delicate work running on virtually no sleep is a terrible plan.

By the time she sets out shortly after dawn, the Temple is quiet again. No point in checking it out now if she wanted to, so instead she tugs her traveling cloak closer, inwardly curses the fact that Sabjorn would probably recognize Guild armor, and heads off.

Of course she kept her armor from before the Guild. It’s still in fairly good condition, given all the shit she’d gotten herself into and out of with it, and sometimes it’s better to avoid leathers. Sometimes meaning now, of course.

It’s funny, though—this armor’s done so much for her, it’s saved her bloody life, and yet it already feels unfamiliar. Too heavy, not enough pockets, not warm enough for spring in Whiterun or anywhere further north, the list goes on and on.

Maybe she’ll just wear some warmer clothes under it next time. For now, though, she can pass as a traveling adventurer fairly easily. She’s seen bandits in less.

Sabjorn, of course, isn’t even wearing a shirt when he opens the door. Nor does he look at all the miserly foreman Mallus painted him as, but it’s immediately evident that he is said miserly foreman. Gelethys barely has to listen to him for five minutes.

Honestly, he might be worse than Maven. Marginally.

“Okay, let me make sure I have everything,” Gelethys says uneasily. “You want me to poison the skeevers that have, apparently, been left running unchecked for how long?”

“Oblivion if I know,” Sabjorn says. “That useless, good for nothing Cyrodilic—”

“Yes, okay, let’s forget about your other employee, you’ve complained about him enough at this point that I know him better than some of my extended family. What do I need to do, and how much will you be paying me for it?”

“Poison the skeever nest, kill any you find, and do it before the sun’s at its highest. I have a very important mead tasting scheduled for then, and I’m not about to reschedule for some skeevers.”

“And… you can’t deal with this yourself, why?”

“You even have to ask?” Sabjorn snorts. “Why, I must prepare for the tasting up here. Besides. I hire help for a reason, and that reason is to do what I refuse to dirty my hands with.”

That settles it. Sabjorn is worse than Maven. The way he acts when Gelethys insists on being paid up front, you’d think she was committing highway robbery. And so Gelethys feels no shame in watching Sabjorn be arrested, with no one in charge now but Mallus… officially.

Unofficially, it’s as good as Black-Briar holdings once Sabjorn’s out of the way. Lesser of two evils, Gelethys supposes, but still. She should be asking about what’ll happen now, or at the very least searching for some kind of evidence as to where Sabjorn got his funding.

Instead, she’s drinking with Mallus to celebrate. Partially because Honningbrew actually tastes significantly better than Black-Briar—she’ll be sad to see it go.

“You know,” Gelethys says after the bottle of Honningbrew’s already half gone, “it would have been nice to know ahead of time about the homicidal lunatic breeding a skeever army in the cellar.”

Mallus drops his own (nearly empty) bottle. “You didn’t know? Maven said she’d tell you.”

Gelethys starts on a string of curses involving sour apples, avalanches, and the entirety of the Tribunal, all three Good Daedra, and Dibella in a metaphysical orgy. When she finishes, she sighs, and lets her head fall to the table in frustration. “Maven said I’d get all the details from you.”

“I didn’t think I had to mention the bloody skeever mage! That’s the sort of thing you should tell someone well before giving them a job! Is that not a thing among thieves, or…?”

“When Maven’s concerned, you don’t ask questions, you just do what she tells you and hope you live to tell the tale.” She rolls her eyes. “This is my first job officially for her, and I really, really hope it’s the last.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Maybe she’ll not take advantage of this. Maybe she’ll be entirely out of character. Maybe dragons actually existed, while I’m at it.”

“What does… dragons did exist? There’s well-known records…” Mallus coughs into his fist. “Okay, point made. Still. Not like there’s anything I can do, is there?”

“There’s always something you can do. The real question is if you’ve got the guts to do it.” Gelethys smiles thinly and continues, “You could continue making Honningbrew instead. Gods know it’s better than the shit Maven makes. I don’t hate this stuff, you know? And that’s saying a lot given that it’s been months and I still can’t quite make myself like Black-Briar mead.”

“I could,” Mallus says. He fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. “But even I know that crossing Maven is a bad idea. All Sabjorn did was work me without pay. Maven could…”

“Hire the Dark Brotherhood, but do you really think she’d waste them on you? She’d be more likely to send them after me, and I doubt she’d care enough about me for that either. Assassinations cost money. And they’re even more expensive if you have to keep them from being traced back to you.”

“I’m not going to ask how you know that.”

“Grew up in Mournhold. That’s not even the craziest guarshit that’s gone on there. It was a fad for a while to get your kids born in Oblivion, right? That’s why I,” she waves a hand next to a candle to demonstrate, “don’t cast a shadow.”

“Didn’t need to know that either, but… okay. Listen.” Mallus sighs. “I can’t go against Maven. Even if she is worse than Sabjorn, there are cheaper ways to have me killed, and even cheaper ways to make my life hell. She was able to find me and make me work against Sabjorn—she’ll find someone else to work against me. It’s way too easy to plant evidence, or poison the mead, or…”

“Then don’t do it overtly. Act like you’re going along with what she wants. Which is…?”

“Black-Briar Meadery West.”

Gelethys can’t quite stop herself from gagging. “That is… about what I expected. Well, she’s not going to send you any financial help to do that, and you can use that to your advantage. Keep making and selling Honningbrew, but do it quietly and if you’re asked, you’re covering the expenses of getting everything ready for the grand reopening as Black-Briar West.”

“But I’ve got money to cover those expenses. Sabjorn used the minimum amount he could get by with from what his benefactor gave him.”

“Yeah, but Maven doesn’t know that. For all she knows, Sabjorn might have pissed all that away.” Gelethys hesitates. “Actually, slightly unrelated question, part of the reason the Guild got involved is because we’re pretty sure someone’s trying to fuck us over through Maven. Don’t suppose you’d know anything about said benefactor?”

“I know she’s a woman,” Mallus says after some thinking. “I’ve heard her talking with Sabjorn upstairs before. Quiet, whoever she is. Too quiet to really make anything out besides Sabjorn’s side of the conversation, but she’s been here before. She’ll be here again, now that Sabjorn’s gone, if only to see what went wrong.”

“A woman,” Gelethys repeats. “Great, that narrows it down to half of Skyrim.”

“And someone who doesn’t like Maven, if this is the same person.”

“That knocks out exactly one person and it’s Maven herself. Still nearly half of Skyrim.”

Mallus audibly snorts. “Well, you’re welcome to go through his things to see if there’s anything identifying? I don’t want them. But if you’re genuine about helping me go against Maven… and if, in theory, I’d be willing to accept that help. What do you think would work?”

“So, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.” Gelethys probably shouldn’t sound this cheerful, but on the other hand she carried out Maven’s orders to the letter. Maven can’t touch her. “Which do you want to hear first?”

Maven studies her with narrowed eyes. “What do you think?”

“Bad news. Got it. So, the bad news is that Black-Briar Meadery West is going to be awhile until opening. Reopening? Couple years at least. Maybe more.”

“What did you do?”

“Hey, I did nothing. I’m not that good a mage. The lunatic living in the basement, on the other hand, collapsed half of the storeroom. Might have been able to stop him if I’d known he was there, but I sure didn’t know ahead of time. Really is the sort of thing you should tell people going in.”

Okay, she’s starting to look murderous, so Gelethys quickly continues, “The good news is that Mallus thinks he can salvage this, he just isn’t going to have the funds to fix the storeroom and make the changes you requested in order to make Black-Briar mead instead of Honningbrew without selling off some of the surplus already made.”

“He’s not smart enough to come up with that on his own.”

“Really? You said he came up with the plan to depose Sabjorn on his own. Which, by the way, worked like a charm! Sabjorn is rotting away in the Whiterun prison, and I’ve got evidence that Sabjorn got his funding from the same individual who was behind Goldenglow.”

Gelethys slides the promissory note over to Maven and leans back in her chair while she reads it. “Same symbol from Goldenglow, if you saw that one.”

“I did,” Maven says curtly. She doesn’t look up, instead scanning the paper for something, any sort of clue. “Did you find out anything else?”

“Nothing substantial. Mallus thought they were a woman, but that was based solely on voice. There are plenty of guys with high voices. Plenty of people who are neither, too.”

That being said, Gelethys almost hopes Mallus is right, because any enemy of Maven is someone she can get on board with, and girls are pretty. On the other hand, they didn’t seem to like the Guild very much either, which is understandable but unfortunate.

“If you say so.” Maven sounds like she genuinely doesn’t care, as opposed to genuinely thinking guys with high voices didn’t exist, in which case Gelethys simply would have had to punch her on principle. “Take this to Mercer, and be quick about it. I don’t have all night.”

Mercer is, of course, equally pleased to hear about the new developments, but accepts the new evidence and tells her to get back to her usual work. So Gelethys does. That much, she’s good at.

Unfortunately, she’s a bit less good at thieving when someone in red and black tries to stab her in the name of the Dark Brotherhood. Certainly doesn’t help that she knows far too well who sent them.

Brynjolf suggests apologizing, even if she doesn’t mean it. Gelethys does not. There’s nothing to apologize for if she wanted to, and she damn well doesn’t want to.

It turns out fine, in the end. The Brotherhood apparently decides she’s not worth sending a second or third assassin after, because she killed the first. Maven gives her the evil eye whenever they cross paths in Riften for months, but who is she going to hire next, the Morag Tong? She can’t want her dead that much.

(And she doesn’t, but Gelethys still can’t quite keep herself from moving fast, looking over her shoulder more often than she needs to, and spending as little time outside as possible.)

Chapter Text

Sometimes, you just need a break from thieving for a few days. Sometimes, you just need a break for a few days. And apparently, agreeing to help your friend reclaim her lost weapon from a Dwemer ruin is Gele’s idea of a break.

Okay, no, it really, really wasn’t her idea. It was Mjoll’s, but Gelethys wasn’t about to let her go back on her own to face a… what was it, a centurion? Friends don’t let friends get themselves killed fighting angry machines in Dwemer ruins, particularly not if this one is stronger than the usual.

In the end, they split the fee fifty-fifty and hire Marcurio for good measure. In Gele’s experience, you can never go wrong with more fire. Also, from what she knows of Dwemer machines, they’re generally not good at attacking or defending at range, or from multiple attackers.

That’s probably part of how Mjoll got so badly injured, not to mention how she managed to get away before the centurion could finish her off. 

The trip to Mzinchaleft is awkward, to say the least. Marcurio definitely knows what Gelethys does for a living. Mjoll probably has some idea, but it apparently hasn’t clicked yet that her sneaky, smooth-talking friend is a thief with the Guild, and Gelethys isn’t about to enlighten her. Not until they’ve got her sword back, at least. Ideally not until they’re out of the Dwemer ruin entirely.

Still, now that they’re here… it’s undeniably a Dwemer ruin, and it’s huge. Impossibly so, with a series of rounded and pointed towers leading up to the actual entrance. Dwemer ruins in Morrowind generally have less aboveground, more belowground—and in the case of the one underneath Mournhold, the one Gele’s most familiar with herself? There’s absolutely nothing aboveground. Just a statue that used to be of Almalexia kicking the unholy piss out of Mehrunes Dagon, and now is of nothing at all but misshapen chunks of stone.

“Well, here we are,” Marcurio says briskly. He leans against a wall. Purple lightning flickers around his fingers on one hand, then dances around the other, then disappears entirely as he returns his arms to a crossed position. “I hope you’re not having second thoughts now—it’s a long road to take back to Riften empty-handed.”

“I’m not,” Mjoll says quickly. Too quickly. “It’s just…”

Gelethys puts a hand on her shoulder. She’s not about to tell Mjoll just how well she understands, or what role Bamz-Amschend played in her exile from Mournhold, but… she does understand. At least Mjoll can get back what the ruins took from her.

Gele’s essentially dead if she ever sets foot back home. Not that Skyrim is much better, these days, but maybe the Dark Brotherhood doesn’t have the bite that the Morag Tong does. Maybe, just maybe, they dropped the contract someone (Maven) put on her when she killed the first assassin sent after her.

With her other hand, she casts a quick detect life spell. There’s no one here, outside the ruins, except herself and her companions. There’s bandits within the ruins, certainly, but there’s bandits everywhere. Bandits, and dwemer, and hopefully no assassins.

“I swore I’d never return to Mzinchaleft,” Mjoll says at last. “To do so alone—and back then, I did everything alone—would have been suicide. I could have taken Aerin with me, but he’s…”

“Not much of a warrior?” Gelethys guesses.

“I was going to say a better cook, but yes. It feels… wrong, almost, to be back here now.”

“Well, we’ve got your back.” Across the entry hallway, Marcurio raises an eyebrow, so Gelethys amends, “Okay, I’ve got your back because we’re friends, Marcurio’s got your back because we paid him to. Mzinchaleft won’t know what hit it.”

“I sincerely hope not. It would be bad enough if all coming here accomplished was getting myself killed, but if it gets others killed too…”

“It won’t. I’m too stubborn to die.”

“And if I died, the Synod would roll back their ban on necromancy just to make me pay off my student loans,” Marcurio supplies. “So, you know, not happening. On a purely unrelated topic, how do the two of you pronounce this place’s name so easily?”

“What, Mzinchaleft?”

“Yes! Maze-call-left or whatever it is. How?”

“I’m from Morrowind, remember? Walk a mile in any direction and you’ll find something dwemeri or daedric, or if you’re really unlucky, a racer nest. You figure it out after a while.”

“This place nearly killed me,” Mjoll says solemnly. “I make a point of knowing the names of my enemies just as well as those of my friends.”

“Ah,” Marcurio replies. “I suppose I should be glad you keep calling me Mercutio, then, given that we’re not friends.”

“...that’s not your name?”

Marcurio only rolls his eyes with a sigh. “Oh, no, it absolutely is. Yep. One hundred percent.”

As far as Dwemer ruins go, Mzinchaleft isn’t terrible. That might just be because there’s no automatons in the upper levels, just bandits who are unprepared for one angry adventurer, let alone three. Mjoll leads the way with her battleaxe and the typical angry nordic yells. Gelethys sticks to the shadows, casting a fireball here or swinging her sword there where the bandits least expect it. And Marcurio fires shock spell after ice spike after shock spell into the fray, resorting to healing spells instead when it’s too difficult not to hit Mjoll or Gelethys.

In short, the bandits don’t stand a chance, nor should they. Their leader won’t, either, locked though he is in a side passage off before the depths of Mzinchaleft. Whoever he is, whatever he uses to fight, he’ll be a formidable foe. Bandits don’t last long without strong leaders.

Kill the bandits, and the leader will simply recruit more and set right back up. Kill the leader, and the bandits will scatter to find a new leader. Kill both, and the area will be bandit-free for at least the next couple weeks, give or take a few days.

(Honestly, there are far more bandits in Skyrim than there are in Morrowind. It’s to the point of being a noticeable problem, but not quite to the point of the local rulers… Jarls(?) doing something about it.)

Gelethys puts the key in the lock—no sense in risking picks when she doesn’t have to—but hesitates before turning it. “Everyone ready?”

Mjoll hefts her battleaxe. Marcurio calls a fireball to each of his hands, combines them to increase the intensity, and holds it there to throw. There’s an unspoken agreement in both sets of eyes. As far as adventuring parties go, this one is better than some of the groups Gelethys hooked up with back home, that’s for sure.

With a single nod, she wrenches the door open. Marcurio’s fireball sails in through the opening, only to be absorbed by a ward that promptly shatters.

The ward was apparently cast by a woman in traveling furs and a red-lined hood, who holds her grey-skinned hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, whoa! What the fuck, watch it!”

“You don’t look like a bandit,” Mjoll says uneasily.

Marcurio wordlessly readies another fireball.

“That’s because I’m not, and—hey, put that away, I’m not your enemy! Boethiah’s bloodstained blade, come on. I’m just an adventurer, just like the rest of you I’m assuming, and I’ll just be on my way in a moment.”

“And why wouldn’t the bandits attack you?” Gelethys asks suspiciously.

“Because they didn’t see me, and I didn’t particularly feel like killing them all overtly today. I mean, I slipped some poison into their water supply, so they would have died anyway. Eventually.” The woman—womer? Probably—jerks a thumb behind her, over her shoulder. “Their leader’s dead. He’s why I’m here, but you’re welcome to check my handiwork.”

“So you came here specifically to… kill the bandit leader.”

“Bounty was for his head, not everyone else’s. Only the person whose name is on the c…” She coughs into her fist, sets her other hand on her sword in a way that clearly says she won’t go down without a fight. ”Sorry, bounty, gets to die personally. What are you trigger-happy kids doing here?”

“Why do you sound familiar?” Gelethys asks.

The womer freezes. “Do I? You might want to reconsider that.”

“No, you do, you’re…” Gelethys reaches up and pulls down her hood. “Auntie Adra?”

“Gele?” The womer—almost certainly Adrasea—slips her sword fully back into its sheath. It goes with a satisfying ker-chunk. Gelethys would swear she saw a glint of gold, for just a moment. Then she slips her own hood down. Yep, it’s her. “What are you doing here?”

“She’s trustworthy,” Gelethys says to the others. Then back to her… technically, second cousin? Who knows. “Mjoll lost her sword here a while back. I came along because I’d rather she didn’t get herself killed looking for it. Marcurio—”

“That’s your name!” Mjoll exclaims.

“—Marcurio came because we paid him.”

“Student loans,” Marcurio says with a shrug.

Adrasea grimaces in sympathy. “If I don’t know how that goes. Take it from me, don’t join any cults trying to repay them, alright?”

“...I… wasn’t… going to?”

When Dwemer automatons—or really, anything that can kill you at the drop of a hat—are concerned, the more people you have involved, the better. So really, it doesn’t take much convincing on any front for Adrasea to join the group, albeit temporarily. 

It’s a good thing, too, because they barely make it to the lower levels when Falmer join the fray. Gelethys (and to her pleasant surprise, Adrasea) are stealthy. Marcurio is stealthier than one might expect from a mage, but not very much so. And Mjoll isn’t stealthy in the slightest. Whatever Mjoll is, it’s the opposite of stealthy.

So maybe they attract the attention of a few more Falmer and chaurus than they should. Plus side: neither Falmer nor chaurus stand up to fireballs very well.

“It’s sad, what happened to the Falmer,” Marcurio says while Gelethys and Adrasea both are scrounging for chaurus eggs (very valuable alchemy ingredients!) and Mjoll is standing guard against more Falmer. Or more automatons, or more chaurus, why limit themselves?

“What happened?” Gelethys asks.

“You don’t know?” Mjoll says in return, eyebrows raised. 

“Hey, we don’t have Falmer in Morrowind. Just the deadly murder-machines and the occasional pissed-off ghost.”

“It is an unfortunate tale all around, I’m afraid.”

“Ysgramor and many others sailed from Atmora to the north, founding a city called Saarthal. They didn’t get along particularly well with the native Snow Elves. History is unclear as to who struck first, but it escalated quickly. The entirety of Saarthal, save Ysgramor and his two sons, was massacred in an event called the Night of Tears.”

“So Ysgramor sailed home, gathered the original Five Hundred Companions—the precursor to the group in Whiterun today—and returned to exact vengeance.” Mjoll sighs. “Wergild for Saarthal would have been one thing, but Ysgramor didn’t stop. ”

“The surviving Snow Elves fled underground to the Dwemer for sanctuary.” Marcurio sweeps a hand around, gesturing at their surroundings. “You can see how well that worked out for them. The Falmer may have outlived the Dwemer, in the end, but they were reduced to shadows of their former selves long before they disappeared.”

“The short version,” Adrasea cuts in, “is that Ysgramor was a fetching bastard, the Dwemer were fetching bastards, and now everyone in modern Skyrim is paying for it because the Falmer hate everyone.”

“You’re not wrong.” Marcurio sighs. “Times like these, I almost wish I’d stayed in Cyrodiil.”

Mjoll taps the hilt of her battleaxe impatiently. “Well, you didn’t, and we’re all here now. We’re close to where it happened. Just up those stairs, and then… I guess we’ll find out if we’re enough.”

Adrasea snorts. “For a centurion? So long as we’re careful, we’ll have nothing to worry about. You two go on ahead. I need to have a word with my niece real quick.”

Mjoll looks skeptical, but given that Marcurio doesn’t seem to care, the two of them oblige.

“You know I’m not actually your niece, right?”

“First cousin once removed is a mouthful, and that’s not even taking into account that my mother’s mother had kids with two different people.” Adrasea shrugs carelessly. “Niece is much easier as far as I’m concerned.”

“Okay. You didn’t want to talk to me about that, though. Did you?”

“Not really. Listen—the contract on you is off.” Upon getting a blank and perfectly innocent look, Adrasea sighs and continues, “I know you know what I’m talking about. The Dark Brotherhood one that I’m sure you know exactly who is responsible for. It’s off. Not getting fulfilled. Do I need to make this any clearer?”

Gelethys looks her over a little more closely. She’s still friendly Auntie Adra, but that’s not irreconcilable with what just clicked. Not in the slightest.

“You’re an assassin,” Gelethys realizes.

Adrasea bows slightly. “Mostly retired until recently. It’s a good thing I came out of retirement when I did, too. Brotherhood policy is to not take or drop contracts on family members. In your case, dropped.”

“It was Maven. Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, good, I don’t need to hint at who you should avoid crossing in the future.”

“Well, if she can’t call on the Brotherhood—”

“Unfortunately, she can, because Astrid likes her money too much. She just can’t for you.” Adrasea fixes Gelethys with her stare. “Make no mistake, though. There are other groups than the Brotherhood, and Maven really doesn’t like you. Seriously, what did you do?”

“Not that much… that she should know about. Really, she shouldn’t even have grounds to suspect me for some of it.”

“I won’t ask. And I expect you not to tell me, because I don’t want to know. Just do be careful?”

Gelethys nods wordlessly. “Thanks.”

“If you need somewhere to lay low for a time, my door is always open. Not that you don’t already know, of course, but I thought you could use a reminder.”

It’s a centurion, alright. It’s actually bigger than the centurions Gelethys remembers from pissing around in Bamz-Amschend, and given that those centurions were twice her height and four times as wide, that’s really saying something. It’s big, and it’s got enough heavy armor to put a mortal legion to shame. Its joints are armored. Its joints have armored joints!

Plus side, that should mean it isn’t particularly agile. Minus side, clearly it had been agile enough to wound and nearly kill Mjoll, one of the strongest people Gelethys knows. Across the room, on a massive stone table next to the dormant centurion, lies a sword in a dark brown stain. Mjoll herself follows Gele’s gaze and visibly pales.

“That’s where it happened?” Adrasea asks softly.

Mjoll nods. Then her eyes narrow. “How did you know—”

“You nearly died? Please. All you Nords are the same. You’d have to be dead or close to it to leave behind your weapons.” Adrasea twists a steel ring around her finger and adds, “Or run, for that matter. I’m guessing that grabbing the sword and running isn’t an option.”

“Not at all. Although I… would like to have it back.”

“I got it,” Gelethys says. “Be right back. Let me know what the plan is when I am.”

Gelethys is good at what she does, and generally avoids doing things she’s not good at. Sneaking around? Good. Sneaking around in the shadows? Good. Sneaking around a Dwemer construct with more advanced sensors than the average mer or man?

She can do it. At least, she thinks she does. A creak from above her, just as she’s reaching for Mjoll’s sword Grimsever, makes her look up.

The centurion’s looking at her.

The centurion’s looking at her.

“Almalexia’s sacred bollocks,” Gelethys hisses. She grabs the sword and throws it, as hard as she can with a little magical assistance, in Mjoll’s direction. An alarm blares. Steam whistles, and the centurion is—moving. Fast. Too fast, how the fuck can it move that fast?

Gelethys wouldn’t have been able to get out of the way in time if she hadn’t been staring, open-mouthed, at the big and unreasonably fucking fast centurion as it raises a massive arm and swings. She lands poorly on the other side of the room. Her ears are ringing from the blow. What she knows will be a massive bruise is already beginning to form underneath her guild armor. Tits are sore, because of course they are, they just got whacked with the rest of her.

It’s certainly not the best landing, but you know what they say: if you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. She isn’t even limping. Badly.

“Sorry!” She calls across the room, hopping back towards the others as she does. Yellow magic dances across her fingers as she presses a healing spell to her ankle, willing the sprain—it cannot be anything worse—to fuck off and die so she doesn’t fuck off and die first.

The centurion, meanwhile, is advancing. Closer and closer to her friends. Mjoll looks determined. Marcurio looks concerned. And Adrasea...

“Spread out!” Adrasea calls, drawing her gold-bladed sword. “You, student loans, stay back and harry it with fireballs. Yes, fireballs, they’ll be more effective than any frost or shock spells you’ve got. Blondie, our best bet is to stay on opposite sides of this massive s’wit and make sure its attention is divided between us. If it starts to spin, get back. Got it?”

“My name is Mjoll the Lioness,” Mjoll mutters, but otherwise nods.

“Gele! Once you’re ready, circle round behind it, keep an eye out for an opening, and—you know what to do.”

Gelethys doesn’t, actually, but she’s got a good idea. As the others launch into battle, she tests her weight experimentally. She can walk again.

Naturally, she then breaks into a full-out sprint to cover the ground she’s lost. Adrasea and Mjoll block bladed swing and blunt swing alike, favoring defensive tactics in a war of attrition they couldn’t hope to win if it was just them. 

But it’s not just them. Marcurio lobs fireball after fireball from well out of range, and nearly all of them hit their target. The one that doesn’t is absorbed in a ward Adrasea throws up beside her, a ward that then cracks from another impossibly fast swing from their enemy.

It’s pretty good, considering. No one’s been seriously hurt yet, but it’s only a matter of time until someone is. And outlasting the centurion, even with extra fire, is an impossibility.

That’s where Gelethys comes in. She watches from the shadows, much better hidden now that the centurion has two much closer and easier to see targets. The first opening isn’t long enough for her to do more than cast a firebolt of her own. The second is almost perfect, but she mistimes it. The third time, as is often the case, is the charm. 

The third time, she sprints for the centurion’s (relatively) unguarded back. With a yell and a dagger at the ready, she leaps. The dagger finds a joint and slips under. Gele’s got a handhold now, and she uses it to pull herself further up.

The centurion does not appreciate this. Steam escapes it with a profound hiss. It starts spinning. Gelethys holds on to her dagger with one hand for dear life. Closing her eyes, she calls to her ancestors for help. Not that she needs it, of course—if you beg your ancestors for help, they’re not going to give it. But if you act mostly indifferent, that’s a different story entirely.

Grandmother Drethys answers in a physical wreath of fire and the faint yet distinct scent of seawater in Gele’s nose. Gelethys lets out a triumphant whoop. The centurion appreciates burning even less, and makes its displeasure known by blowing out more steam and spinning even faster.

Gelethys wedges her sword in another joint, giving herself a second handhold, and holds on. Dear dead Grandmother Drethys may be helping her to an extent, but in the end, it’s up to Gelethys herself to finish the job.

She wouldn’t want it any different. No self-respecting Dunmer would. That’s why she holds on, a flaming parasite digging into the centurion’s metal back, until it tires or until her flame burns out. Whichever one comes first, Gelethys isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter, because the other shortly follows. Drethys’s flame is gone, and the centurion has stopped spinning—for now.

It’s now or never, and Gelethys isn’t fool enough to think her dear dead grandmother isn’t watching to see what she does next. She starts to pull her sword free, but stops. Instead, she drives it further in through the flame-weakened metal.

The centurion falls, and Gelethys tumbles down with it. But she gets up, in the end. 

The centurion that had nearly taken her friend’s life doesn’t.

Hi Da! Hi Ata! I’m going to preface this by saying that yes, I know it’s a shock to have your daughter disappear overnight and then hear absolutely nothing from her for months, and then out of the blue have some courier chase you down with tidings from Skyrim. Given that neither of you are stupid, and I know you know what I do for a living, you can probably guess why I left Mournhold so abruptly.

In case they intercept this (which is rather likely, actually) I won’t go into details of where I am now, nor what I’m doing. Although really, it shouldn’t be hard for you to guess, and a certain group whose bad side I am very firmly on has little to no power outside of Morrowind, so I’ll just out and say it. It’s not like they’re the only people who want me dead. They haven’t even come particularly close to succeeding.

Ata, Da, don’t worry, I promise I’m fine. I can’t come home anytime soon for fairly obvious reasons, which is… sad. I miss home. A lot. Boethiah’s tits, I even miss running like hell from the sewer liches. (Yes, multiple, please don’t go down there searching for them unless you have a very fast escape route planned. They don’t bother anyone if you don’t fuck with their sewers.)

I miss home, but it’s strange. I thought I would be a lot more homesick by now. Instead, I’ve probably found the most Mournhold-like place in Skyrim. It barely compares to Mournhold. (The sewers don’t have a single lich in them, probably.) But… it feels like home.

It helps that I’ve found friends. Colleagues, at least, although there’s a few people I’m comfortable enough with to call friends by now, and not all of them are my colleagues in the fine art of acquiring useful objects. 

I was staying with your cousin Adrasea up in Windhelm for a while, too. She’s actually the one who encouraged me to come to where I am now, and I’m so glad she did. I ran into her again inside a Dwemer ruin of all places, and she… well, she had a lot of things to say, mostly about how I should be more careful when fighting big golden things that could easily kill me, but she thought I was doing a lot better now.

And I am! I don’t know how this place is so familiar already. It shouldn’t be this familiar already, but it is. I think I’d miss it if I went back home, and that’s the strangest thing of all.

Anyway, I’m doing fine, I’ll try to sneak back in for a visit sometime next year. If you’ve got any plans, let me know so I can avoid those times.

Love you both,

Indarys Gelethys

Chapter Text

It’s been a few mornings since the adventure to Mzinchaleft when it happens. Gelethys is sitting in the Flagon, nursing a mead, pretending she doesn’t hate it, and contemplating whether or not setting a fire rune under her bed would be a breach in guild policy. On the one hand, she’d probably get yelled at for it even if it wasn’t. On the other hand, it’s Frost Fall. It’s getting bloody cold out, even in Riften, and she would really rather not freeze.

Then the very earth shakes with a shout of DOVAHKIIN, and all thoughts of fire runes and getting in trouble flee her mind. (It’s likely for the best. She isn’t exactly good at casting rune spells yet, and if she miscast that it would probably set her bed on fire.)

“What the ever-loving fuck was that?” Gelethys asks, quite justifiably.

“You say that like I know?” Vex counters. “Earthquake or something. Didn’t think we got them here.”

“We don’t,” Delvin calls from across the Flagon. “It’s the—”

“If you say it’s the curse, I am going to stab you, and Mercer is just gonna have to accept it was in self-defense.”

“How is that self-defense?”

“Defending my sanity. Which is already camping out on death’s threshold.”

“Okay, okay, no stabbing,” Brynjolf steps between them with a pointed look at Vex, “and Delvin, lad, I speak for all of us when I say please quiet down about the curse. That wasn’t it.”

“Course it wasn’t,” Gelethys says like she doesn’t, privately, believe Delvin might not be as far off after all. “What was it? Pull up a chair, Bryn.”

Brynjolf does so. Delvin looks like he wants to, but doesn’t ask (and Gelethys isn’t about to invite him when Vex is sitting next to her.) He does, however, relocate to a closer table so he doesn’t have to yell across the Flagon.

“Either of you ever heard of the Greybeards?” 

“Nope,” Vex says. “Assuming they’ve got grey beards.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Gelethys laughs. “Seriously, though, Bryn. Who… or what, I guess, are they?”

“Monks that live on top of the Throat of the World.” For Gele’s benefit, Brynjolf adds, “The big mountain in the middle of Skyrim. There’s a path to the top from Ivarstead.”

“Knew the mountain, did not know the name. So they can… cause earthquakes?”

“Ground shaking was a side effect. That had to have been the… well, the Voice. It’s said that they can cast magic with their words by shouting things in the language of dragons.” A shadow crosses Brynjolf’s face as he adds, “Or so I’ve heard, anyway. Not exactly the biggest fan of traditional nordic culture myself.”

“Completely understandable,” Delvin says sympathetically.

“That’s impossible,” Gelethys cuts in. “...not the nordic culture thing. The dragon thing. Dragons don’t exist. Besides, if they did, they wouldn’t have a language, because they’re not dragons, they’re literally just big cliff racers.”

“Uh…”

“Lass,” Brynjolf says, “as much as I’m all for denying the values of traditional nordic culture, dragons exist. Currently, actually. Did you not hear about what happened to Helgen?”

“If you think that was a dragon,” Gelethys replies, “you need to take a trip to Morrowind. A halfway skilled pyromancer could do that.”

“Um… I saw a dragon flying toward the Jeralls last week,” Rune pipes up, passing by on his way to the Cistern. “It was really big, and black, and—”

“And you’re how sure it wasn’t a big cliff racer?”

“Um… well, it was getting dark, but it didn’t really look like a cliff racer to me…”

“Have you ever seen a cliff racer?”

“No, but—”

“Big cliff racer.” She leans back in her chair, satisfied. “Listen, I’m all for old monks with grey beards yelling loud enough to shake the ground, and is magic involved there? Probably. But are dragons involved? No, because dragons don’t exist. Anything they’ve supposedly done can be explained by other things.”

“Lass,” Brynjolf says wearily, “Cliff racers can’t breathe fire.”

“Go to Vvardenfell, go raid a racer nest, and try telling me that again.”

“I—you know what, I’m done. Go talk to Mercer, lass, he found something on Goldenglow.”

Now that makes Gelethys sit up in her chair. “The one behind Goldenglow?”

“Likely Honningbrew too. He didn’t find them, but he’s got a solid lead. And he wants you to follow it.”

“He does? Or Maven does? Because at this point I think it’s been established she wants me dead.”

“Been telling you, lass, if she wanted you dead you would be dead. But I don’t think this has gone by Maven yet. Now hurry up, and I don’t want to hear another word about dragons.”

They don’t exist, but Gelethys nods anyway and stands, leaving her unfinished mead behind.

Gele’s never been to Solitude before. It’s big, and high up. Of course it is, it’s situated on some kind of stone natural arch. That, coupled with the guards gossiping away about a wealthy couple murdered at their own wedding and the fact that no one’s seen Jarl Elisif in nearly a month, gives Gelethys the general impression that she doesn’t particularly want to spend much time here in the future, either. But first things first: she’s got a job to do.

Find ‘Gajul-Lei,’ more commonly known as Gulum-Ei. Find out, by any means necessary, who paid him to act as the broker for Goldenglow. Ideally find out why, too, and get Gulum-Ei back into working with the Guild, but those last two goals are secondary.

If Gelethys has a goal of her own concerning whoever is working to bring down the Guild, well, that’s nobody’s business but hers.

(Despite what Mercer thought, she was not joking when she said they should recruit the Guild’s nemesis. Particularly not if they’re cute, whoever they are.)

“By your scent, I’d say you’re from the Guild,” says the green-scaled Argonian nursing at a corner table in the Winking Skeever. “Eugh. No mistaking that sewer stench.”

“You’re guarshitting. Our sewers don’t stink,” Gelethys replies. She slides into the seat opposite him. “Trust me, I’d know. Born and bred in Mournhold here. You’re Gulum-Ei, I take it?”

She gets a scowl in return. “I told Mercer I wouldn’t deal with your lot anymore.”

“I’m sure you did. And really, I can’t blame you for that, he’s an ass and not the good kind. But not dealing with us is one thing. Actively working against us?” Gelethys clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “I’m here about Goldenglow, Gajul-Lei.”

“Goldenglow? Sorry to say, I know very little about that… bee farm, was it? You’ll have to try some other purveyor of information. And let me remind you, information. Information and goods. I don’t deal in property.”

“I have a bill of sale plucked from the previous owner’s safe that says otherwise,” Gelethys counters. “You acted as a broker for its new owner. Tell me who said owner is, and we’ll forget you were involved at all.”

Gulum-Ei scoffs. “No, you won’t. Word of this gets around, I’ll be ruined at best. You’re not hearing anything about her from me.”

“Her,” Gele repeats. Sounds like Mallus was right. “Is she cute?”

“Are you—you can’t be serious. How would I know? Why do you care? Why would I care?”

“Good question. I’m just curious, mostly.” Gelethys grins. “And listen, I’m willing to tell Mercer this was all a big understanding and we got you mixed up with some other Argonian named Gajul-Lei. Just tell me who she is.”

“Tempting, but not enough. You’ll have to do better to jog my memory.”

With a sigh, Gelethys says, “What will it take for you to remember more?”

The Argonian smiles toothily. It’s unsettling. Maybe not quite as much as Mercer is by virtue of existing, but certainly close to it. “Oh, I’m glad you asked.”

“Do you know why they’ve beefed up security around the Blue Palace?” Gelethys asks, sliding back into the chair opposite Gulum-Ei. “Because I sure do now.”

“I’d assume it was because of what happened at Vittoria Vici's wedding,” Gulum-Ei says in return. “Tragic thing, that. I’ve heard the Brotherhood was involved, but how could they be? Vici and that barbaric Snow-Shod simply couldn’t stand the thought of being married for any longer, so they killed each other.”

“Tragic. Really. But also, there’s several ways you could make two people seemingly go crazy and attack each other, the easiest of which would be a frenzy poison, so no it really wouldn't be that hard for the Brotherhood to be involved. At all.” Gelethys clears her throat, because Gulum-Ei is starting to look distinctly uncomfortable. “Anyway, that’s part of it, but apparently the Jarl’s disappeared. Gone without a trace, nothing missing save her and the dead king’s war horn.”

“Really? Perhaps she’s been kidnapped.”

“Maybe,” Gelethys agrees. “But I doubt it. It’s been a month, and I spend most of my time in Stormcloak territory. If the Stormcloaks had kidnapped her, somehow, they would’ve been making noise about it by now. Anyway, not here to gossip. I got your fancy wine, it’s in a barrel outside the door, who is the buyer?”

“You’ll forgive me if I check to ensure the goods are there and intact.” Gulum-Ei gets up, then hesitates. “But I’ll give you a little now, just to keep you waiting for the rest. I was approached by a woman who wanted me to act as the broker for something big. She flashed a bag of gold in my face and said all I had to do was pay Aringoth for the estate. I brought him the coin and walked away with her copy of the deed.”

“That’s more like it. Did she say why she was doing this?”

“I didn’t ask. I tend not to ask too many questions while I’m on the job. I’m sure you can understand. However, I did notice that she was quite angry, and it was being directed at one Guildmaster Mercer Frey.”

“Angry at Maven and Mercer, and definitely a woman,” Gelethys muses aloud. “That only narrows it down to about half of Skyrim still. Almalexia’s flaming sword, I fit those criteria. Don’t suppose you got a name?”

“I haven’t gotten your name.”

“Oh! It’s Gele—”

“Because I haven’t asked for it. You think I’ve lived this long by asking too many questions?”

“Fair. But you have to have noticed something. Anything!”

Gulum-Ei glances at the door. Still looking away, he says, “She was hooded and hid her face well. I couldn’t pick her out from a crowd if I tried. That being said—”

Gelethys perks up. “Yes?”

“—you’re more like her than you realize. You’re both dark elves.” Gulum-Ei looks back at her, and grimaces. “But you’re obviously not her.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you wouldn’t be asking me about this if you were her, now, would you? Like I said: I didn’t get a name. I don’t know her name.”

She studies him for a long moment. When he turns to leave, Gelethys grabs his wrist tightly. “I think you’re lying. You do know her name, even if she didn’t tell you it.”

The scales in his face pale to a lighter green as he narrows his eyes. “That’s enough questions from you. You’ll have to wait for me to ensure you carried out your end of the bargain for me to answer anything else. Do be a good little thief and wait here, won’t you?”

“Fine.” She lets his wrist go free. “Don’t be long.”

Gelethys watches him go, then settles in to think. So whoever this is: Dunmer, really hates Maven and Mercer, a woman. Might be cute, might not be. Gelethys hopes she’s cute.

Wait. Adrasea could fill some of those criteria, barring the fact Gele’s not sure if she even knows who Mercer is. But it wouldn’t be Adrasea, would it? She wouldn’t have the money to buy Goldenglow and fund Honningbrew… except that she’s an assassin, assassinations pay well, and she clearly had enough money at some point to buy a house in Windhelm outside the Grey Quarter.

So no, not Adrasea. Some other Dunmer woman in Skyrim. The hates-Maven-and-Mercer thing can be assumed as a given for anyone who’s interacted with them ever.

This really doesn’t narrow it down enough. She needs more information, and if she’s right—if Gulum-Ei does know the mysterious womer’s name—then she’s got to get it from him. So, she waits.

In retrospect, she should have realized well before she finally did that he wasn’t coming back.

Leaning back against the cave wall, Gulum-Ei exhales in relief and closes his eyes. He’s got no idea he was followed, and for a few, short moments, Gelethys lets him continue to believe he’s alone.

Then she stands, draws her sword silently, and says, “Hello.”

The Argonian’s eyes snap open. He pushes off the wall abruptly. So abruptly, in fact, that he topples to the cave floor in a messy, swearing heap of scales and tail. “How did you—”

“Bandits.” Gelethys tsks. “Hire some better guards next time.”

“That… implies that there will be a next time.”

“If you’re more useful alive than dead? Sure. Start talking.”

“There’s no need to do anything rash…”

“Start talking.”

“Listen, it’s not as bad as it seems, I was going to tell Mercer everything, I swear! There’s really no need to tell him anything about,” he gestures at the cave around him, and the lengthy tunnel Gelethys had sneaked down to get here, “all this.”

“All Mercer has to know is who she is, and that you were cooperative in the end.” Gelethys lowers her sword, but does not put it away. “Start talking.”

“You’re more reasonable than I assumed. Good. I’ll… I’ll tell you. The name of the person you want is…” Gulum-Ei visibly gulps. “Karliah. Her name’s Karliah.”

“Karliah,” Gelethys repeats. She slides her sword back into its sheath at her hip and crosses her arms with a nod. “Pretty name. Someone I should know?”

“You must be new to Skyrim.”

“Well, yeah, what about it?”

“She… she didn’t give me her name. She didn’t need to. Her eyes… once you’ve seen them, you know them no matter how long it’s been. Makes it hard for her to stay unnoticed, but she’s clearly done it well enough. Until now, I suppose.”

“So she’s pretty notorious. What did she do?”

“Oh, only murdered the guildmaster before Mercer! Now she’s after him too!”

“The guildmaster before Mercer… who was that?”

“Gallus,” Gulum-Ei says immediately. “His name was Gallus.”

Now that’s a name she’s heard before. Seen before, more specifically. It was in Maven’s ledger, the one tucked safely in the bottom of Gele’s bag currently, hidden under all her other supplies and folded up in a dirty rag so it isn’t conspicuously book-shaped. 

For Gallus, the entry before her birthday had said.

Had she tried to pay him off for something? Was it a bribe he hadn’t accepted, and she’d then had him killed by Karliah? Karliah, who hates Mercer and Maven both now… well, Gelethys would hate Maven too, if she’d been double-crossed after doing something like that for her.

Of course, Gelethys wouldn’t have done something like that, but the point remains.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” Gulum-Ei continues nervously, “but Gallus was a much better guildmaster than Mercer.”

“You say that like it would be hard?”

“True. Listen, I—I wasn’t working with her. Honest. I didn’t know it was her until after the deal was already on, you have to believe me!”

“I believe you,” Gelethys lies with a smile. “If I don’t, it doesn’t really matter. Don’t suppose you have any idea where she is now?”

“Well… I might.” Gulum-Ei glances nervously over his shoulder, but there’s nothing there but rock wall and an interestingly-placed switch. “The last time I saw her, she just muttered something about ‘where the end began’ and left. That was months ago. Now, you have to tell Mercer I’m worth more dead than alive! I mean, worth more alive than dead!”

“I don’t have to tell him anything, he explicitly ordered me not to kill you, and I’m not in the business of pissing off powerful people without a good reason.” Gelethys decides not to mention that ‘spite’ and ‘because I just don’t like them’ count as good reasons. “Now, I don’t suppose there’s a back way out of here? Bandits are bandits, but I don’t feel like sneaking past all of them again.”

Mercer is, as it turns out, far less pleased to hear about the buyer’s identity than Gelethys was. (It perhaps doesn’t help that, due to the Stormcloaks apparently attacking Whiterun, she had to take a rather long detour through the Reach and Falkreath that ensured she got back a solid two weeks after she thought she would.)

(Racist fetchers. Here’s to hoping they lose. Who knows, maybe they already have and she just hasn’t heard it yet.)

“Karliah,” Mercer repeats, holding Gulum-Ei’s copy of the deed. He paces back and forth in front of his desk, brow furrowing further all the while. “You’re sure he said Karliah?”

“Positive,” Gelethys replies. “Don’t know where else I would have heard the name otherwise. He said something about her murdering the last guildmaster? Some guy named Gallus?”

“Gallus was not some guy. ” Mercer turns on his heel to fix Gelethys with a glare. “He was the best thing that ever happened to this Guild and everyone in it. And Karliah killed him.”

“Touchy subject, got it. I’ll shut up now.”

“No, you will not. You will tell me everything Gulum-Ei said about her.”

“She wants you dead.”

“Not surprising,” Mercer says in the most even tone he’s had since Gelethys got here. He puts the deed down on his desk and plants his hands on it, staring down yet seeing something completely different. “Did she say anything about where she was going? Anything at all?”

“It’s been months, she probably isn’t still there, but… well, if nothing else we’ll—” (Mercer knows she means I’ll .) “—be able to pick up her trail from it. Maybe. Hopefully.”

It’s too bad clairvoyance spells don’t work on people. Now, objects that people are carrying? Those work. But without knowing what Karliah looks like, never mind what she has on her, that doesn’t have a chance in Oblivion of working. 

Mercer looks up, voices a single word: “Where?”

“The only thing she told Gulum-Ei was ‘where the end began.’ Nothing more than that. I thought maybe it meant the Flagon, but we would have known if she was here.” Gelethys frowns. “Wouldn’t we?”

“We would have. She’s good, but she’s not that good. She’s careful. Methodical. She would want to end me well away from any witnesses, just like she did Gallus.” A dark shadow passes over Mercer’s face then. “He deserved better than an end like that.”

“I… guess. Didn’t really know him.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. You’re what, eighteen?”

“Twenty-six. Birthday was a few months ago.”

“You certainly don’t act it.” Mercer circles around his desk to the back, then kneels. When he stands again, he’s carrying a well-worn pack. “The important thing is, I know where she means. It’s where she killed Gallus. It’s where she intends to kill me. It’s a trap, and it’s one I intend to walk right into if it means her getting what she deserves.”

“Oh,” Gelethys says, because what else is she supposed to say to that?

“For a loudmouthed, irreverent, disrespectful brat, you’re good at sneaking around. I hope, for both our sakes, that you’re at least halfway as good with that sword as I am with mine.”

“More than halfway,” she says with a smile. The smile fades when she realizes just what she’s being asked… or more specifically, being more or less ordered to do. “I’m coming with you.”

“Unless you have something more pressing, in which case I would recommend not showing your face around Riften ever again.”

Gelethys is suddenly very glad she’d helped Mjoll out with Riften’s skooma problem before being sent to Solitude.

Chapter Text

“Can’t stay longer than the night, sorry.” Gelethys sips more delicately than she’d like at her tea. “Honestly, I doubt Mercer would appreciate me even staying the night, but also he can’t possibly expect me to travel out into the tundra in the middle of the night, in the middle of a blizzard. At night. And if he does, I’m telling him where to shove it.”

“Please don’t tell your boss where to shove it,” Adrasea says without turning around. She stirs the pot of… stew? Soup? Whatever it is, it smells distinctly of cabbages. “The last thing you need is more enemies, dear girl.”

“He’s got more than me, I’m currently helping with a mutual enemy, and if I freeze to death he won’t be getting said help. So I think I’m good.”

“Just explain that to him, without unnecessary insults, and you will be good.” She taste-tests her probably-soup and nods, satisfied. “I’ll be right back, I need to bring some of this next-door.”

When she returns, after she’s settled in across from her, Gelethys asks, “Next-door?”

“Well, not literally next-door. Down the road a spell. I stay out of your business, you stay out of mine.”

“But you’re—”

“I’m not asking. You’re just choosing to tell me what you’re up to here, for some odd reason. Just because you can’t keep your mouth shut, dear girl, doesn’t mean I have to open mine.”

“Can too. I didn’t even tell you who I’m helping Mercer hunt down.”

“Karliah,” Adrasea says, and Gelethys drops the teacup. Adrasea catches it in one hand without spilling and sets it down on the table. “Gele, even I’ve heard of her. Things might be… strained, between your guild and my organization, but you must be the only person in Skyrim not to know her name.”

“I know her name now,” Gelethys says defensively. 

“Better late than never. Do be careful, will you? The guildmaster she killed was one of the best swordsmen in Skyrim.”

“Aw, but I’m always careful!”

“Really.”

“Careful enough! Besides, Maven hasn’t tried anything since you got the Brotherhood off my ass.”

“That you know of. Be careful. You’re lucky you only lost your shadow from that centurion.”

“Of course,” Gelethys says. She’s pretty sure Adrasea didn’t buy that excuse then and doesn’t now, but she’s not about to out herself by asking. Besides, she’ll be careful. More careful than usual, anyway.

In the end, she won’t be careful enough.

“That old guildmaster, the guy before Mercer,” Gelethys continues. She very pointedly does not look at her bag. “Did you know him?”

“Nope. Wasn’t involved in much of anything for my first few years in Skyrim, save hiding from the Thalmor. I’m sure you can imagine how well that went.” Looking past Gelethys, Adrasea narrows her eyes at nothing in particular. “He died about a year after I moved here, but I didn’t know that for a while. Still, the man might be dead, but he did a lot. I still hear about him from my colleagues, and it’s going on three decades.”

“He must have been better than Mercer, then. The only reason I’d bring Mercer up that long after his death would be to talk about how much of an ass he was.”

Adrasea nods. “You didn’t hear this from me. But our current Speaker and I? We really don’t agree on much, particularly where Maven is concerned. Still, the one thing we do agree on is that it would have been better, for everyone involved, if Karliah had killed Mercer instead.”

As the horse rides, the trip from Riften to Windhelm takes two days. Gelethys, however, doesn’t have a horse, so it takes her nearly four days to get to Windhelm alone—detours after she’s already stopped for the night in supposedly haunted nordic barrows near Ivarstead notwithstanding—and another to find Snow Veil Sanctum in the snowfields north of Windhelm.

“You’re late,” Mercer says as she approaches.

“I don’t have a horse. I don’t want a horse, either, before you insist I get one, walking works fine!” Gelethys grins nervously. Mercer does not seem to be particularly impressed. “Also, I feel the need to point out you didn’t actually say when I needed to meet you here beyond ‘as soon as possible.’ Which is what I did. Skyrim’s pretty big.”

“I expected you to be faster. You’re lucky she’s still in there.”

“If you’re so impatient, you didn’t have to wait for me! How do you know she’s still in there?”

“Her horse was outside.” Mercer nods over his shoulder, to where the frozen corpse of one lies. “She won’t be using it to escape once we’ve gone in after.”

Gelethys doesn’t particularly like horses, but she can’t quite stifle a wince at this one’s fate. “Right. Got it. Do you want me to stand guard outside while you deal with her, or…”

Honestly, she’d prefer to go in too. Karliah is just another piece of the puzzle here. What happened to Gallus? That, Gelethys knows now, she just doesn’t know why. And she won’t find out (for sure) why without hearing it from her.

“Absolutely not,” Mercer says. “Once we’re inside, you’ll be leading the way.”

“Oh.” Gelethys blinks. “Cool. Any particular reason why?”

“Because I said so. Now, come on. I unlocked the door in while waiting for you, and I don’t want to waste any more time on Karliah than I have to.”

There’s blood on the draugr’s sword, and it’s fresh. The draugr itself is lying motionless and dead, skeletal hands holding a sword in a way that almost, almost looks like it hadn’t awoken at all. But now that Gelethys is looking closer, that stab to its abdomen doesn’t look old enough.

This isn’t one she dealt with, and Mercer is still a couple rooms back, which means…

“Karliah’s here,” Gelethys says as he comes in. “And she’s wounded. Look.”

Mercer’s sword is in his hand. He hasn’t bothered to wipe the mummified draugr guts off his blade, and Gelethys can’t keep herself from wincing when he sheathes it still without wiping it clean. He has to know that’s bad for keeping your sheath from stinking, right?

Somehow she doubts her guildmaster would appreciate a lecture on proper sword etiquette at the best of times, so she gestures to the draugr anyway and continues, “This draugr hasn’t been dead for long, and that’s not my blood on its sword. Or yours. Unless you can teleport, of course?”

“Very funny,” Mercer mutters in a tone that suggests he’d find literally anything funnier than that. “If she was wounded, she isn’t now.”

“Ah.” Gelethys considers this. “Healing spell, or…?”

“Alchemist. Very good alchemist. If she could use magic, she hid it as well as she hid her true intentions.”

“Right. She…” Gelethys bites her lip. “Why did she kill him? Gallus?”

“No one except her knows. I intend to find out before she draws her last breath. That being said… maybe she was jealous. Maybe she was tired of always being number two.”

“How do you get from that to murder? Honestly, that’s when you talk about things!”

Mercer levels a glare at her. “Stop asking useless questions. The more time we waste out here, the more time she’ll have to get the jump on us. Sword out, mouth shut, keep your guard up.”

Gelethys obeys wordlessly. She squelches the part of her that wants to protest that these questions aren’t useless, that she’s curious, that she wants to know… but she’s starting to get the feeling that wanting to know for sure was what killed Gallus.

It won’t kill her too. But she’s going to find out the truth before Karliah dies.

“What are you looking at?” Mercer asks, eyes narrowed.

Gelethys decides not to comment that there’s exactly one reason that Karliah knows they’re coming miles away, and that reason is that someone keeps stumbling into bone chimes, and that someone isn’t her. Bad luck happens to everyone.

“Your sword,” Gelethys says. Which… hey, when did he clean it? She would have sworn he sheathed it without cleaning it. Apparently she missed that. “Dwemer make?”

Mercer looks surprised for a moment, but—eventually—nods. “Picked it up years ago. Gallus helped me sharpen it up to something more than a dull piece of metal. It’s gotten me out of a lot of tough situations since then.”

“Swords are generally useful for that,” she agrees. She pulls hers out again. “Mine’s not really worth much, nowhere near anything of Dwemer make like yours, but… it means a lot to me. Da helped me make it, Ata helped me enchant it, and I haven’t used anything else since.”

“A good sword will get you a long way. Refusing to back down, no matter how much it costs you, will get you the rest.” Mercer looks sharply back the way they’d come. “Perhaps some of your reckless boasting did have substance.”

“Some of it? I don’t say things I can’t back up. And, hey, while we’re at it, I’m not the one waking up the draugr.”

“Shut up. She’s close, and if she thinks you’re sloppy, she’ll let down her guard.”

“If she thinks I’m sloppy? I—” Gelethys walks right into a bone chime, and lets out a string of expletives that wakes the draugr the bone chime didn’t. “Fuck me.”

“I really would rather not.”

“I take back what I said.” She beheads a draugr, and guts another with the same half-turn. “Bad luck can happen to anyone and those chimes aren’t exactly easy to see.”

“No,” Mercer says testily, “they aren’t.”

And yet somehow, he doesn’t set off a single set of bone chimes between there and the end of the dungeon. Well, nordic burial mound? Some kind of nordic ruin, anyway. They all feel the same. Rotting air, draugr everywhere, and the distinct sense she’s been here before.

Of course she has. She’s been ‘here’ just outside Ivarstead this week. Really, those ancient Nords had no diversity in their architecture. At least Dwemer ruins vary somewhat, even if you always know something big and bold and brassy is going to make its best damn attempt to kill you.

Gelethys isn’t careful enough, when it happens. But in the end, it’s doubtful anything she could have done would have stopped that arrow. One moment, she’s creeping into the room. Her blade’s at the ready. Her guildmaster’s at her back. She’s watching the shadows for any hint of movement, any reflective glint of light off metal.

The next moment, a black-feathered arrow sprouts from her chest. For an eternity in a moment, she stares down at it. Her sword slips from her fingers and clatters to the ground, but even that sounds like it’s in another room. Dimly, she tries to recall how magic works, but the closest she gets to a healing spell is a tiny, useless spark of gold.

She can’t fail. Not here. Not now. She can’t die when so many others have tried and failed to put an end to her story. She can’t, and yet her legs fail her when her will doesn’t. Gelethys drops to her knees with a wordless scream. As she falls forward, she makes one last desperate grab for her sword.

She misses it by a hair. The last thing she sees, before darkness envelops her fully, is the faintest hint of indigo eyes.

Nobody told her Karliah was an archer.

Chapter Text

She’s twenty-six years old, and she’s not dead yet. Her blood is on fire and freezing at the same time, and she can’t move, can’t move, can’t move.

She’s—

—all alone. In a blizzard, the wind whipping the snowdrifts around her into a frenzied dance. The full moons above her make everything white, which is to say everything, glimmer with an otherworldly sheen. It would be beautiful, if she wasn’t stuck out in it.

“Mercer?” She calls, cupping her hands around her mouth for all the good it will do. He was supposed to meet her here, but if he’d had any sense he would have turned back when it became clear that the weather was not in their favor.

If she had any sense, she would have turned back too, but she can’t risk leaving if he’s still somewhere out here anyway. She’ll never forgive herself if he freezes to death on her account, no matter how pissed she is at him at the moment.

But better to be alive to never forgive herself than both of them dead.

She’ll give him five more minutes. Then she’s out of here.

Almost as soon as she thinks it, she hears the crunch of footsteps on snow. A relieved sigh escapes her lips as she turns to greet him. “I was beginning to think—”

She freezes. Red eyes meet indigo, and the owner of the latter pair stares back. Not Mercer at all.

“I—”

“What are you doing here?”

On the ground. Floor is cold, she’s cold, so cold. No moonlight shines through the grate above her, but the meager torchlight in the room is more than enough to illuminate the skeleton in front of her, Mercer with his sword drawn, and the pretty womer with indigo eyes who’s finally stepped into the light.

He’d never said she would be here. And yet, as she suddenly looks sheepish, Gelethys begins to think she wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I couldn’t let you come alone.”

“Did you honestly think your arrow would reach me before my blade finds your heart?” 

Mercer. His sword’s not even drawn, but her bow is at the ready. Gelethys doesn’t like their odds, considering she can’t move and she’s freezing.

“I should have known better than to think you wouldn’t come,” she says with a smile. “I… appreciate the company, even if I wish you hadn’t come at all.”

“Give me a reason to try,” Karliah says with the quiet ferocity of someone who waited too long to serve their revenge cold and is now trying to serve it completely frozen. Like her feet are starting to feel. Like her everything is starting to feel, honestly. It’s a miracle neither of them have gotten hypothermia yet.

“I had no choice,” Karliah says with the absolute conviction of someone who believes something a little too much for their own good.

“You’re a clever girl, Karliah.” Mercer somehow manages to make a compliment sound like an insult. “Buying Goldenglow Estate and funding Honningbrew Meadery was inspired.”

“To ensure an enemy’s defeat, you must first undermine his allies. I won’t let him undermine yours.”

“The thought is appreciated, but—” Gele’s eyes go wide. Is that movement in the snowstorm?

“It was the first lesson Gallus taught us.”

“You always were a quick study.” Mercer, again, manages to make a compliment sound like an insult. And there’s no way he doesn’t mean it like an insult.

“Not quick enough, otherwise Gallus would still be alive.”

Gelethys tackles her to the ground. Mercer’s sword passes so close over both their heads that she can feel it go by. She rolls off, draws her own sword, makes sure to position herself between Karliah and Mercer.

“Gallus had his wealth, and he had you,” Mercer says, advancing slowly yet deliberately out of the snowstorm. “All he had to do was look the other way.”

Karliah’s derisive snort proves exactly what she thinks of that. “Did you forget the Oath we took as Nightingales? Did you expect him to simply ignore your methods?”

“You owed me that much.” Mercer’s sword glints in the moonlight. “And instead, you turned around and pretended you had the moral high ground when you had nothing of the sort.”

“Shut up,” Gelethys says. “Karliah— run.”

“Enough of this mindless banter! Come, Karliah. It’s time for you and Gallus to become reunited!” Mercer, at last, draws his sword. He doesn’t charge, which proves to be his mistake. 

It’s all the time Karliah needs to down a potion. The empty bottle shatters on the stone floor.

“I’m no fool, Mercer. Crossing blades with you would be a death sentence.” Indigo eyes blaze with unconcealed fury, right before they wink out of sight. “But I can promise you, the next time we meet will be your undoing.”

“What about you?” Karliah asks. “You can’t—”

“Warn the Guild. I’ll be fine.” They both know she’s lying, but Karliah turns and runs anyway.

Before she can even try to fight back, Gelethys is—frozen. Her sword clatters uselessly to the ground beside her, or has it already? Mercer’s standing over her, staring at her, sword angled almost carelessly toward her now unprotected back.

She can’t move.

“How interesting,” Mercer drawls. “It appears Gallus’s history has repeated itself.”

“Go fuck a blighted racer,” Gelethys tells him.

Mercer looks almost like he’s considering this for a moment. Then he says, “I believe I’ll pass. Karliah has provided me with the means to be rid of you, and who am I to not take my old friend up on it?”

“Guarshit. She’s not your friend anymore than Gallus was, not after you—” Her eyes go wide with a sudden, horrifying realization. “You… killed him.”

“None of this would have been possible without you,” Mercer says triumphantly. He’s winning this fight and he knows it. But it’s okay. As long as Karliah gets away—

“I hope she makes you burn.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Best of luck with that, or not.” Mercer visibly yawns. “Farewell, Gelethys. I’ll be certain to give Brynjolf your regards… oh, but one more thing. How could I forget?” He kneels to pick up Gele’s fallen sword and adds, with a cruel smile, “You won’t be needing this where you’re going.”

Gelethys launches into an exceedingly profane description of Mercer’s sexual habits, his mother’s sexual habits, and several things that shouldn’t be possible for anyone at all person-shaped to do without breaking their back, never mind upon request. She doesn’t stop until he stabs her, and even then it’s out of pain and not because she’s done referencing the left nutsack of Almalexia’s chief ordinator.

The last thing she sees, as her sword’s kicked away and she falls to the snow, turning it red with her own blood, are the two full moons. The sky’s clear again, the snowstorm gone as quickly as it came.

“Forgive me,” she whispers, and then she does nothing at all.

She’s twenty-five years old, and she’s creeping. Specifically, creeping through the darkened caverns of Bamz-Amschend, looking for some weird machine called the weather-witch. She’s got a map. Gelethys might not have a lot of things going for her, but she can at least read a map.

The job’s simple, perhaps one of the simplest she’s ever gone on. Find this ‘weather-witch,’ whatever it is and whatever it does. Set it to the picture of an erupting volcano, and that’s… literally it. Simple and easy, and yet it’s more important to get this right than perhaps anything else she’s done in her life.

The real question is what this weird Dwemer(?) machine does. Presumably it has something to do with weather, or witchcraft, or both. She’s curious about it, sure, but not that curious. Curiosity in Dwemer ruins tends to get people killed.

And she can’t be killed. Not now, when she’s so, so close.

All she has to do is get past all these automatons between her and Skybreak Gallery— much easier said than done—and then, there’s nothing left in her way. She runs a hand along the intricate patterns on the wall. It comes away dusty.

Of course it has. No one’s been down here except researchers and dumb kids on dares in years, and no one’s been this far since… who even knows. Who even cares?

Exploring Bamz-Amschend, fascinating as it is, is still very much secondary to getting. This. Done.

Finally, after what feels like hours but can’t have been more than one, a heavy door opens up to the gallery itself. It’s a wide-open room, nearly spherical, with a catwalk around the edges and a platform in the center. More importantly, there’s not a single operational automaton in sight. There’s several spiders hacked to pieces, but any useful components have long since been removed. Gelethys taps one of the more intact-looking ones experimentally. It doesn’t budge. Her hand comes away dusty—though not as dusty as the walls themselves.

Whoever came here last was here a long, long time ago, but still after the disappearance of the Dwemer. Couple hundred years at most.

“Well, here we are,” Gelethys says to no one in particular. She exhales in relief, takes a deep breath, and walks out onto the catwalk. In the center are a series of three switches, all set away from her and toward the wall.

The wall has some sort of a picture on it. Whatever it is, it’s not a volcano. Her orders were abundantly clear: volcano. She knows what a volcano looks like. What Dunmer worth their sujamma doesn’t know what a volcano looks like?

This has to be the weather-witch, although Gelethys can’t help but wonder how the Camonna Tong got their hands on this map. There aren’t any instructions on how to configure the switches on the map or the machine itself, but it can’t be that hard, right?

Trial and error it is. There’s not that many different combinations. And yet, when Gelethys tries to pull back the left lever, it refuses to budge.

Gelethys turns around to glare at the bulk of the machine and launches on a rather colorful tirade involving orichalcum ore, a full bottle of mazte, and the long-lost Ashlander artifact known only as the Thong of Zainab. She stops mid-sentence, bends down to pick up something that must have fallen out of its socket, and examines it.

It looks like a Dwemer... coherer, she thinks it’s called? She’d have to check with her ata on the exact terminology, and Ata would ask where she got it and that’s not really a conversation she wants to have even if they both know what her current line of work is, so checking what it’s called for sure is out. Still, she’s seen these before in Ata’s workshop, and while most of them are just useless if intricate hunks of metal, this one is… strange. She can feel it thrumming with something in her hand. Something powerful.

She looks up at the machine. There’s a distinctly coherer-shaped socket in it, and it fits into said socket with a satisfying click.

The left lever budges this time, and the picture changes. It does not, however, change to a volcano. The correct combination for a picture of a volcano is, as it turns out, is the left lever and the middle lever pressed forward, and the right lever pulled back.

Triumphantly, Gelethys creeps back the way she came. She’s as good as Camonna Tong now.

That triumphant feeling disappears as soon as she sees the sky. It was a clear winter morning when she went in. It’s still morning, but the sky isn’t clear. It’s overcast, but the clouds… they’re almost red.

And something’s falling from them. Something that, even as there’s a distinctly uncomfortable tickle in the back of her throat, she holds out her hand to catch. It’s something grey, and powdery. Is this… snow?

No, this can’t be snow. Snow is supposed to be white, at least while it’s falling. What is this?

She coughs, sending the grey stuff flying, and it hits her, all at once, what it is. It’s ash. This is… an ash storm. They’re supposed to be fairly common on Vvardenfell, given the still-erupting volcano there, but ash never comes this far.

This is an ash storm. In Mournhold. The last and only recorded one was nearly two hundred years ago, and rumored to be caused by Almalexia. Da and Ata both had looked uncomfortable when she brought up that rumor with them, so she dropped it. Why would a goddess do that, anyway? Why would she need to? How would she even do it?

Gelethys has a sinking feeling she just discovered how. But Almalexia didn’t do this, and neither did the Nerevarine. Not this time. She did this. Gelethys did this. The Camonna Tong wanted an ash storm in Mournhold… why? To scare people? Or to remind them who’s in charge?

Gele’s been trying to get the Camonna Tong to notice her for years. To know who she is. To recruit her to be like them. But causing an ash storm...

If this is what the Camonna Tong will do, she no longer wants any part in it. 

She slides back down the ladder, jumping past the last couple rungs, and sprints back inside. Gelethys emerges an hour later, covered in sweat and ash and soot. The charred yet still intact coherer is in her bag. Her fingers tingle wildly from casting about twenty fireballs too many, almost all of which were directed at the same target after it became clear what she couldn’t destroy with fireballs and what she could.

She leaves Mournhold for good an hour after that, with nothing but the clothes on her back and the remaining supplies she’d taken to Bamz-Amschend in her pack.

Chapter Text

She’s twenty-six years old, and she’s… not dead. No yet about it. There’s still a dull throbbing in a few places, and if she really thought about it she could probably identify exactly why individual places hurt, but she’s not particularly keen on thinking about that right now. Or much of anything, really. Everything seems brighter than normal, although the snow is going to be pretty bright in the sunshine anyway.

She pushes herself up with her elbows, blinking in the light. There’s a fire crackling merrily a couple paces away—and that explains why she isn’t cold, although she wouldn’t be all that bothered if she was right now—and on the other side of it…

On the other side of it sits a hooded womer in well-worn guild leathers, cross-legged and carving the shaft of an arrow in her lap. Her eyes are indigo, quite unlike the usual red of pretty much every other Dunmer Gele’s met in her life, actually. They almost glimmer, like sapphires in shadow.

“Good to see you awake,” Karliah says without looking up. “How are you feeling?”

“Really, really good, actually.” Gelethys extricates herself from the bedroll and mimics Karliah’s position. “You’re really cute.”

“Yes, I’m Karliah, and for the record I didn’t—” Her hands (well-worn, callused) stop. She looks at Gelethys now, those beautiful indigo eyes now filled with confusion. “What… did you say?”

“You’re really cute,” Gelethys repeats. She grins. “What, has no one ever told you that before?”

“Not recently.”

“What the fuck? I’ll punch them.” She moves to get up before putting a hand to her head and thinking better of it. “Ow. Seriously, people should tell you that more often, if this is your reaction to it.”

“You’re currently high out of your mind from everything it took to keep you alive.” Karliah looks down again and resumes her work. “But the thought’s appreciated.”

“I’d still say it if I wasn’t high off… restoration magic?”

“And all but one of the potions I packed just in case. You’re very lucky I packed so many.”

“I’ve been told I’m pretty lucky in general, so yeah!”

Karliah’s carefully neutral expression turns sad. “Mercer tried to kill you. If he finds out he failed, he won’t fail a second time. How is that lucky in the slightest?”

“Because he failed! I’m not dead and I gotta say, I haven’t felt this good since I was like… seven.”

“It’ll wear off in a few hours at most.”

“Good to know! Telling you now, you’ll know when it does because I’ll probably start cussing out Mercer on the spot. Speaking of which,” Gelethys scrambles to her feet, “we’d better get going! Murderous bastard isn’t going to wait for us and we can talk and— oof! Walk.”

A much more accurate descriptor of what Gelethys does is that she tries to scramble to her feet. Her head spins when she tries, and she plops right back down on her ass.

She might be imagining it. Or, for a second, Karliah might have had on the very tiniest of smiles.

“Easy,” Karliah says sharply. “If you decide you must get up now, do it slowly or you won’t do it at all.”

Gelethys visibly pouts. “Fine. Only ‘cause you’re cute.”

“Whatever reasoning works for you.” Karliah hums to herself as Gelethys attempts to get up again, this time more slowly and carefully, and leaning heavily on the rock wall behind her. “I’m afraid I left before Mercer decided to stab you. Didn’t catch your name.”

Still bracing herself against the wall with one hand, Gelethys pushes herself away from it experimentally. Her legs don’t crumple beneath her. Relieved, she walks around the campfire to where Karliah is and stands there awkwardly. “Um… Gelethys. Indarys Gelethys. Call me Gele, everyone does. And I already know yours.”

“Karliah,” the archer agrees. “You can sit down.”

“I’ll pass. I… did he take my pack? I know he took my sword,” and feeling unreasonably good or not, Gelethys would very much like to stab him and take that back. Maybe it’s wearing off sooner than Karliah said.

“He did not take your pack. I’m sorry about your sword.” Karliah reaches behind her, picks it up with one hand, and tosses it up. Gelethys catches it. Her bag’s unbuckled. “Wasn’t sure you were going to make it, so I took a look through your things earlier. You have some… interesting stuff in there.”

“Yeah,” Gelethys agrees. Lacking anything better to do, and starting to feel tired, she sits down next to Karliah facing the fire, bag placed between them. “Are you talking about the Dwemer coherer or Maven’s ledger?”

“How did you even get that?”

“Uh… coherer, pulled it out of a ruin in Morrowind somewhere. Maven’s ledger, stole it.”

“You’re telling me you stole Maven Black-Briar’s ledger… how long ago?”

“Uh… Evening Star. So about…” Gelethys counts off on her fingers. “Hey, almost a year. It was before I officially joined the Guild, so technically I wasn’t breaking Guild rules by doing that or by stealing her horse.”

Karliah doesn’t respond. Gelethys looks over to be greeted with a half-confused, half-concerned look back. Even softer than normal, Karliah asks, “How, exactly, are you alive?”

“Well, you’d know that better than me at the moment.”

“True. Paralysis poison. Slowed your heart, kept you from bleeding out long enough that when I circled back to check on something else, you were only mostly dead. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Thank you,” Gelethys says quite emphatically.

“Still, that’s not quite what I meant. I was more surprised to find you still there than you were to wake up. Then again, I couldn’t believe he’d kill… Gallus. Even when it happened.”

“I knew it! Well, not that specifically, but I knew he was hiding something. I just thought it was him fucking Maven or something.”

“He’s hiding that now?”

Gelethys stares at Karliah. “Uh. You know what, that wasn’t actually confirmation I needed or particularly wanted but I’ll take it anyway. But just to clarify: you didn’t kill Gallus.”

“Shadows, no! I couldn’t—I wouldn’t —”

Shadows? That’s an interesting choice of expletive. Not like Gele’s in any position to talk, exactly, but still. Seems like neither of them are good little Aedra worshippers. (Or particularly devout followers of the Reclamations, interestingly enough.)

“I got it. Painful subject. I’ll shut up now.” She does not shut up now. “You need a hug?”

“What? No.”

“Do you… want a hug?”

“No,” Karliah says again. Looking away, she doesn’t see Gele’s shoulders sag a little. “I… need to discuss it at some point. Right now, it’s just a lot.”

“I understand.”

Karliah smiles sadly. “No, you don’t. You have a choice to make, and you don’t have to make it now. Do you want to—”

“Yes.”

“You don’t even know what I’m asking!”

“Answer’s not gonna change.” Gelethys pulls up her knees to her chest and hugs them, staring at the fire. “You saved my life. You really, really didn’t have to.”

“What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t?”

“A smart one. Mercer could have been waiting for you, or… or, I don’t know. Something. Draugr could have woken up again.”

“Perhaps. That’s the kind of thing Mercer would say.” The assumption that this was before he betrayed and murdered Gallus goes unspoken. “That’s why I couldn’t leave you—or anyone—there. I won’t become the kind of person he is to ensure he gets what he so greatly deserves.”

Seeing that resolve in her eyes, Gelethys has to take a moment to collect herself. Almalexia’s fucking tits that’s… wow. Holy shit, she is gay . Which perhaps contributes a little bit to her willingness to stick with Karliah for the near future.

“You won’t,” Gelethys agrees, “and I’m going to help. Even if I didn’t like you, you saved my fucking life. I’m pretty attached to that. And pretty fucking pissed at Mercer. I’m assuming that’s what you’d want someone else in your corner for, dealing with him.”

Karliah nods. “You don’t have to do this. You could leave Skyrim. Tell me where you’re going, and I’ll send word to you after he’s dead.”

“I could leave Skyrim.”

“But you’re not going to.”

“Absolutely the fuck not. I already can’t go back to Morrowind, at least I’ve got some family in Skyrim. And some friends that think I’m dead now. If nothing else, imagine all the jokes I could make.” Gelethys leans back onto the frozen ground, hands behind her head. “Hey there, Bryn, turns out the rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated!”

“Bryn’s still alive? Glad to hear some good news about the Guild for a change.”

“Why… wouldn’t he be?”

“True. I just thought Mercer would have offed most of the old guard by now.”

Gelethys thinks about this for a long moment. “Maybe he has. Gallus died… twenty-five years ago?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Right. The only people old enough to have been around back then would be Mercer himself, Bryn, Delvin, maybe Cynric—”

“Nope.”

“And that alit-fucker Niruin.”

Karliah audibly gags. “He’s still around? That’s unfortunate. Makes sense that he’d stick around with Mercer in charge, though.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll die or disappear by the time we’re in any position to try anything? People do that all the time.”

“Maybe.” Karliah does not sound optimistic. “If you’re determined to stick with me, we still need a next move. Can’t stay here forever, and I wouldn’t want to.”

Gelethys looks at the door she was presumably dragged out from—gods, is that her blood drying there?—then up at the entrance higher on the hill, the one she and Mercer had entered in. “Me neither. If this is where he did it… why here?”

“Not just for the poetic justice of it, I assure you. That poison’s intended function—”

“The one you shot me with?”

“The one I only had one dose of and intended for Mercer, yes, that poison. Its intended function was to paralyze indefinitely until the antidote was administered, doing so by slowing the victim’s heart. I made a split second decision to get you out of the way, and it saved your life.”

“Thanks,” Gelethys says again. “Sorry. Don’t suppose you can make any more?”

“Wouldn’t have another opportunity if I did. I know better than to trust to luck, particularly not where Mercer is involved—” (If Karliah sees the confused look Gelethys gives her, she ignores it.) “—so my backup plan was to search… I laid him to rest properly while you were unconscious. It was the least I could do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. What happened that night was between the three of us and no one else.”

Gelethys stares up at the sky and tries not to wince. “Got it. Not being sorry, here. Hey, I think it’s starting to wear off?”

“Faster than I expected,” Karliah notes. There’s the rummaging sound of her either putting something into or taking something out of her pack. “Likely for the best, too—this isn’t a conversation I can have, nor we should have, here. We’re a roughly equal distance from Windhelm and Winterhold. Do you have a preference?”

“Windhelm.”

Karliah, evidently, did not expect that to be her preference. “Windhelm?”

“Yeah, I know, but my aunt lives there. Already didn’t like Mercer and she knows how to keep a secret, something most people seem to think I’m incapable of.”

“I could never guess why.” Karliah stands, then offers Gelethys a hand up. “Windhelm it is, then. Coming?”

“Yeah,” Gelethys says. She takes it.

The walls of Windhelm are in sight when a roar rings through the air. Karliah hisses a curse and reaches for her bow. Gelethys goes for a sword that’s no longer there. Her hand finds an empty sheath and clenches angrily. She turns.

Oh. That’s a...

“Bear,” Karliah says, already fitting an arrow to her string. “Do me a favor and distract it?”

Her arrow is loosed from said string, lodging firmly in the bear’s thick neck, but it only seems angrier. Gelethys nods. “Sure, what do you—”

Karliah shifts the bow to one hand and grabs something from her pack. A sword is shoved into Gele’s arms. It’s hewn from some dark metal, probably ebony, and glimmers with the deep red of a vitality-draining enchantment. Pretty sword.

“Take this. Keep it away from me.”

Gelethys takes the sword by the hilt and, as one does when faced with big, murderous creatures, she runs at it with an angry yell. Several angry yells, actually. Strings of curses tend to be slightly more effective when directed at enemies that can understand them, but they don’t hurt either.

She sees her chance when the bear stands on its hind legs. Instead of jumping back, she leaps forward, driving her sword into its exposed belly. It slides in so neatly that if Gelethys didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t think it had slid into anything but thin air.

“Take that!” She whoops triumphantly.

“Gelethys, get out of there,” comes a shout that she realizes, belatedly, is Karliah. An arrow flies past her, bouncing harmlessly off the bear’s thick skull.

She looks up at the bear.

The bear looks down at her.

“Fuck,” Gelethys says, right before it comes crashing down. There’s no time to get out of there now, so she doesn’t bother trying. Instead, she calls a fireball to her hand and punches. Her fist connects with the bear’s throat. It roars again, this time in pain, and rises once again to its full height.

This time, she does leap out of bear-smashing range. She watches, transfixed in a way, as the bear stands there. It’s held up by invisible stings for a few long seconds, as if a spell has been cast on it, holding it there.

Then another arrow comes. This one lodges itself firmly in its eye. The bear, finally, falls.

Something taps her on the shoulder. Gelethys looks to see Karliah who, for a few moments, almost looks concerned.

“That could have gone better,” Gelethys admits.

“Yes. It could have. Did you seriously just punch a bear?”

“Um…” Gelethys shrugs. “Maybe?”

Karliah lets out a long-suffering sigh. “You can keep the sword. I won’t be using it, and you clearly need it.”

“It got stuck.” She ignores the fact that she didn’t actually try to pull it out. “But… yeah, thanks, I can’t fucking believe that Mercer—wait, was that sword…?”

The archer gives Gelethys a long look before, slowly, nodding. “It belonged to Gallus,” she confirms. Karliah takes a deep breath. “Come on. I’m not leaving it for the wolves.”

Gelethys realizes, a couple seconds after she’s continued toward the rapidly cooling corpse, that she’s changed to talking about the bear. She follows.

“I know you said you didn’t need or want a hug, but—”

“Not today.” Karliah closes her eyes, and stops. Eventually, she opens them again. Indigo meets red. “Not today. But maybe someday, if we manage to stop Mercer and live to tell about it.”

Gele’s gut is starting to hurt again, where Mercer skewered her. But it’s not that bad, they’re almost there, and she doesn’t want to bug Karliah with that.

“Let’s not linger outside,” Karliah says. “The last thing we need is some guard recognizing me and word getting back to Mercer.”

“Mhm,” Gelethys agrees.

“So… your aunt lives here. Grey Quarter?”

“Surprisingly, no.”

“Really? Good for her. Well, then, lead the way.”

Gelethys wordlessly does so. They’re about halfway to Adrasea’s home when Karliah pulls her aside and asks, in a low voice, “Are you still feeling alright?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I’m fine,” Gelethys lies.

Karliah raises one skeptical eyebrow.

“Okay, I’m not fine,” she admits. “Hurts a little. It’s not that bad, and we’re almost there. How did you even—”

“You didn’t shut up until we made Windhelm,” Karliah says matter-of-factly. “I’ve been hard-pressed to get you to say a word since then. Either you really, really don’t like this place, which is fair, or that’s bothering you more than you’re willing to admit.”

“How about both?” Gelethys tries.

“I’ll accept both. How bad is it?”

“Not terrible. Distracting, but I can keep going. Like I said, we’re almost there.”

Karliah hums an assent. “In that case, if you don’t want me checking your bandages in the middle of the single worst city in Skyrim—”

“Not biased at all, I see,” she manages to quip back.

“Just a little. Let’s get a move on, but if you need to slow down to keep from tearing anything open…”

“I’ll let you know,” Gelethys promises.

“Thank you.” At that, Karliah smiles slightly. “As it turns out, it is significantly easier to keep people alive when they’ll actually tell you what’s wrong. Fun fact.”

“I… okay?” Somehow, she gets the feeling she’s not really referring to her anymore, so Gelethys shuts up after that. At last, after a few minutes more walking, they turn the corner onto Adrasea’s street. Holding her side, she says, wearily, “Here we are. That’s my aunt’s place. Technically first cousin… once removed? Twice removed? Shit’s confusing.”

“You’re telling me your aunt lives there,” Karliah says, eyeing the building appraisingly. “Didn’t think non-Nords could live outside the Grey Quarter here.”

“She married one or something? Ask her about it. Let’s…” Gelethys moves to take another step. Her head spins, her vision blurs, and nearly everything nearly fades away.

“Hey. Hey,” Karliah’s voice cuts through the fog. She slings Gele’s arm over her shoulder. “Do you need to sit down?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“Maybe.” Gelethys shakes her head, blinks hard. There’s the stone walls and walks and buildings of Windhelm again. Karliah’s the only thing keeping her from collapsing. “We’re almost there, I told you.”

“And you,” Karliah mutters, “are taking a seat the instant we’re not out in the road. I should have made you drink something after the bear. Come on.”

Leaning far heavier than she would like on Karliah, Gelethys stumbles the last several yards to the door. She takes a deep breath, then knocks.

The door opens almost immediately.

“I told you you could use the…” Adrasea looks at Gelethys. “...back door. Gele! I didn’t expect to see you back so soon. How did it—”

“Pretty badly,” Gelethys admits. “I nearly died. Tripped a trap in the ruins, got stabbed and left for dead, nearly got smashed into the ground by a bear… but you know what? I didn’t die.”

Adrasea purses her lips appraisingly. “You say that, but you don’t look as good as you seem to think you do.”

“Please! I always look good.”

“May we come in?” Karliah asks. Gelethys feels rather than sees Karliah tense when Adrasea’s attention goes to her.

For the first time, Adrasea really looks at her companion. Her eyebrows shoot up, but she nods, and steps aside. “I have… a few questions.”

“Those can wait.”

Adrasea nods again, firmer this time. “Of course. Get her in here.”

“I take it,” Adrasea says, after Gele’s bandages have been reapplied and she’s been all but forcefed another healing potion, “that I’m missing quite a few things here.”

“Just a few,” Gelethys agrees. “It’s… a bit complicated.”

Karliah turns her indigo gaze on Adrasea and says, “You know who I am.” It could be phrased as a question, but it isn’t.

“Anyone who’s ever found themself on the wrong side of the law knows who you are,” Adrasea says mildly. “Barring my niece, of course.”

“Your niece,” Gelethys cuts in, “is right here.”

Adrasea reaches over to ruffle her hair affectionately. “My niece is also supposed to be resting.”

“I’m sitting down! Besides, I can’t sleep now, it’s too bright.”

Delicately, as if she’s afraid to interrupt, Karliah clears her throat. When she has Adrasea’s attention again, she says, simply, “I didn’t kill him.”

This catches Adrasea off guard. Still, she nods. “Mercer Frey, then. Never liked the fetcher. Was it him who attacked Gele?”

Karliah glances at Gelethys uneasily. “Are you sure we can trust her?”

“Positive,” Gelethys replies.

Adrasea tsks disapprovingly. “You’ve always been too trusting, dear girl. Someday, that’s going to be the death of you. You should know better than to trust an assassin.”

“Eh. You had your chance to kill me. You didn’t. Now you’re stuck with me.”

Karliah sighs. “Is she always like this?”

“Yes.” Adrasea smiles. “You get used to it. There are much worse ways to be. And while I have you here… I have to say that I already had my suspicions about you, Karliah, and you’ve only confirmed them. Thank you for saving my niece. The world, I think, would have been a much darker place without her.”

Her indigo eyes shine in the waning sunlight, but Karliah nevertheless nods. Gelethys might hear her whisper, it would have been. Or she might have imagined it. Regardless, Karliah does soon continue, “We can’t stay long. Mercer won’t be looking for her, but he’ll be looking for me, and I… this is the closest I’ve ever been to finally bringing him down. I can’t stop now.”

“Nor would I ever ask you to. Should you need another blade or somewhere to rest further, my doors are open. That being said, I don’t think you are the only people here in desperate need of some sleep.” Adrasea punctuates her statement with a huge yawn.

“If you don’t mind?” Karliah tries. “That would be… nice. Really.”

It occurs to Gelethys, quite suddenly, just how unused Karliah must be to basic kindness. Of course she is, she’s been on the run for as long as Gele’s been alive. But just because it makes sense doesn’t make it remotely okay.

Gelethys adds it to her mental list of reasons to make Mercer’s death slow and painful.

It’s a long list already, and it’s only going to get even longer from here.

The next morning, after hearing the full extent of the situation—or at least, the full extent of what Karliah’s willing to bring up about it with someone only tangentially involved—Adrasea hums to herself speculatively, thinking. 

“It sounds to me that the kind of bloodbath you’re trying to avoid will be unavoidable without evidence,” she says at last. “And the only person that would benefit from that would be—”

“Mercer,” Gelethys spits. “What, him trying to fucking kill me isn’t enough evidence?”

“He could all too easily spin it as you having betrayed him first,” Karliah replies.

“So… no.”

“No, but I… do have something that could, feasibly, be considered evidence.” She reaches into her bag. Finding what she’s looking for at once, Karliah brings out a small, leatherbound book with a metal circle emblazoned on the cover. She rubs a thumb along the book’s surface, blinks hard, and gives it to Gelethys. “This belonged to Gallus. It was his journal.”

Very much aware of Adrasea peering over her shoulder, she undoes the clasp and opens it. There is a lot of writing in there, penned carefully and precisely by the man Mercer murdered. It’s also completely made up of strange runes that almost look familiar.

“You see our problem,” Karliah continues. “I would be very surprised, not to mention a little disappointed, if he hadn’t done something to encrypt his journal. But these symbols… I’ve never seen them before. I don’t suppose either of you have?”

“If I have,” Gelethys says, “I didn’t know what they were.”

“Unfortunately not,” Adrasea says as well, “but… may I see that?”

Gelethys looks to Karliah, who shrugs slightly. She gives it to Adrasea, who flips through the book, brow rapidly furrowing.

“It’s highly unlikely that Gallus was the only person in Skyrim who knew how to read this, and it’s too calculated for it to have been something made up on the spot.” She closes it, and reaches over Gelethys to return it to Karliah. “Have you considered the College of Winterhold? They would be the most likely candidates to, if they can’t read it for you, know where you can find someone who can. Given how wide-reaching your Guild was, and the College’s reputation I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some former contact of yours still there.”

“Not a contact, exactly, but…” Karliah considers this as she returns the book to her bag. “An old friend of Gallus. He never liked Mercer, so he’s unlikely to go running to the Guild, but he never liked me, either, so he might do it anyway out of spite.”

“I see your organization isn’t dysfunctional at all,” Adrasea mutters dryly. “At least in mine, we just get it over with fast. You stab someone, you make amends, you laugh about it over dinner.”

Sometimes, Gelethys can forget that Adrasea is an assassin by trade. And sometimes, she makes it all too obvious.

Chapter Text

Adrasea travels with them as far as Winterhold, citing business near Solitude that neither Gelethys nor Karliah ask her to elaborate on. Then she continues west, leaving two thieves without much in the way of a plan besides hope that Enthir is in the inn and not in the College.

He is not in the inn. And the innkeeper isn’t exactly willing to take in a message—or possibly, given the College’s reputation, even able to take in a message. Karliah can’t go in herself, not unless she wants to be immediately shocked, set on fire, frozen, or all three.

That leaves Gelethys to get in, hope that Enthir actually listens after she mentions Karliah is involved, and really hope that he can actually decipher this pretentious asshole’s pretentious journal.

Okay, no, maybe she’s being a bit unfair. After all, Gelethys would like to think Karliah has good taste. Gallus clearly hadn’t planned on anyone needing to read his journal beside himself, and writing it in a language no one else understands is a great way to keep someone nosy from reading it. It’s not a terrible plan, and besides, the asshole in this situation is clearly Mercer.

That still doesn’t keep Gelethys from being slightly annoyed about it. Gallus couldn’t have known that he’d be murdered and his stupidly hard to read journal would be the only proof of Karliah’s innocence. But Gele’s life would be a whole lot easier currently if he, somehow, had.

She isn’t a mage, really, in any sense of the word. If anything, she’s a rogue who dabbles in swordplay and magic, but hey, if it’s enough to get her into the College of Winterhold, she’ll absolutely take it.

“I really do just want to see what it looks like inside,” she tells the gatekeeper with a winning smile.

“Do you? At least you’re being respectful, which shouldn’t be how low the bar is, but nevertheless,” mutters the skeptical-looking elven lady with a glare at the town behind her. If the fact that she was head and shoulders taller than Gelethys doesn’t clue her into the fact that this was undoubtedly a high elf, the slight Summerset accent certainly does. “I am Faralda, one of the senior wizards here. Who are you, that you seek the College? You don’t look like a mage.”

Gele, for her part, is suddenly quite glad that she had the sense to change out of her guild leathers earlier. She still doesn’t quite look like a mage, mainly because mage robes aren’t cheap and wouldn’t be easy to come by in Winterhold proper anyway, but better to look like no one in particular than to come across immediately as the dashing rogue she is and get blasted to pretty smithereens.

“Uh, I’m Gelethys. I’m a bit of a mage myself, but I mostly just want to meet up with an old friend who lives here. I’ll be in and out.”

“Perhaps,” Faralda agrees, “but I should warn you: those untutored in the ways of magic will not survive the crossing to the College.”

Gelethys cranes her neck to see past her. “Is that because the bridge looks like it’ll collapse entirely if I breathe wrong, or…?”

Faralda smiles. It isn’t a friendly thing—Gelethys may have hit a nerve there. “The condition of the bridge helps to deter unwanted visitors. Now, I’m sure you won’t mind if I test your skill? Or I could tell your friend to meet you out here, instead.”

Yeah, no, Gelethys is not having that conversation with Enthir in public. Especially not since he won’t know her name, and the name Karliah would just get him to sound the alarm. 

“No issues here. I’ll take your test.” Gelethys meets Faralda’s unfriendly smile with a bigger one of her own. “Although I should warn you I am mostly self-taught, so if it’s anything to do with theory—”

“Oh, it isn’t. Tell me. What do you specialize in?”

“Destruction, mostly. I like fire. Stereotypical, I know, but you don’t live in Morrowind long as I have and not at least respect fire. Uh… also some things that aren’t technically legal, exactly, magically speaking, so you won’t want to see that—”

“You’re familiar with the school of Mysticism?” Faralda cuts in, eyebrows raised and going higher as she nods. “Fascinating. Our College is unaffiliated with the Synod or the College of Whispers, so there technically is no rule against it, but few people actually bother to seek out spells from it these days either. And our… helper from the Thalmor doesn’t help either.”

Gelethys makes a face. “Do helpers from the Thalmor ever actually help with anything?”

“Absolutely not, but you didn’t hear it from me. That being said, ours wouldn’t be caught dead on gatekeeping duty, so why don’t you show me something from that school? Something that wasn’t shunted unceremoniously into another school when the Thalmor banned it?”

Why doesn’t she indeed? Well, for starters, there aren’t very many spells Gelethys knows that weren’t adapted in some form. The ones that do… well, there’s nothing here to lock magically, or un lock magically—and Gelethys would really rather not be pegged as a thief before she even sets foot inside the College. She may be stupid sometimes but she isn’t stupid enough, or desperate enough, to try robbing an entire college of mages.

That leaves Mark, and its counterpart Recall. Normally, Gelethys would be happy to show them off, except that the last place she set a mark to return to was the middle of the Ragged Flagon. Even ignoring how long it would take to get back here from Riften, there’s a slightly bigger issue with reappearing in the middle of the Ragged Flagon: Mercer, who thinks she’s dead and wouldn’t hesitate to finish the job.

Still, it hurts a little, because Gele’s only ever set marks to recall to in places that she knew, without a doubt, would be safe to recall to.

The Flagon just isn’t safe anymore. Not for her. Not while Mercer is still in charge, and it hasn’t been safe for Karliah for around as long as Gele’s even been alive.

So, she blinks hard, forces an even bigger smile before Faralda can figure out she’s on the verge of tears, and says, “Absolutely. Watch this.”

First is the mark spell. Purple light dances across her fingers, culminating in a brief flash in the precise spot she wants to recall to. It’s off the path, enough so that no one will be in the same spot she wants to recall to—because that could and would get very messy.

“What did that do?”

“You’ll see.” Gelethys jogs over to the other side of the path, lets her magicka regenerate a little more, takes a deep breath—and casts the other spell. In a flash of purple light, she is suddenly standing several feet to Faralda’s left, instead of several feet to Faralda’s right.

“Oh,” Faralda says. “Is that a recall spell?”

“Sure is. Very useful when I get myself into sticky situations, which happens more often than I’d like in Skyrim but it did the same back home, too.” Gelethys shrugs easily. “Can I go in now?”

The answer to that question is, fortunately, a yes. Faralda escorts Gelethys across the bridge itself—likely because that thing looks and is about as stable as Red Mountain—and leaves her to figure out where to go from there. Asking a pretty human woman with faded purple robes and bobbed brown hair for directions gets her a few strange looks, but she does get the directions, and so the hard part then is figuring out who Enthir is.

That turns out not to be so hard, because Gele’s barely even walked into his room before she is greeted by the words, “You look like a thief.”

Gelethys startles. Her head snaps around to look at the sorcerer seated in a chair next to the door. “I’m sorry?”

“You may not have the leathers, but you walk like one. You must be new here.” He extends a hand. “Enthir. I’d advise against trying to steal anything from here, unless you fancy being thrown into the Sea of Ghosts from rather high up.”

“Contrary to popular belief, I have basic common sense.” Gelethys shakes his hand. “My name’s Gele.”

He doesn’t visibly react. “Should I know it?”

“Probably not. But I’ve got a… friend, who thought you could decipher this.” Gelethys pulls out Gallus’s journal, opens it, and passes it to Enthir. “Is she right?”

Enthir reads over it wordlessly, his eyes widening as he does. Eventually, he closes the book to look at the cover, with that strange symbol on it—and then opens to the inside front cover. There’s words there, in Tamrielic—but when Gelethys peers over to look at them, Enthir snaps the book shut and holds it out of her reach.

“Where did you get this?”

The easygoing mer of before is gone. It is with eyes of suspicion that he looks upon Gelethys now, and a sharp note to his voice when he speaks, more firmly this time, “Where did you get this?”

No sense in lying now. “Some old Nordic barrow north of Windhelm, roughly… southeast of here?”

“Snow Veil Sanctum,” Enthir says for her. He holds the journal reverently, now. “You didn’t find this by accident.”

Again: no sense in lying now. Not when the Dwemer gears of his brain are clearly coming together to read her motives like a book. 

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well! I’ll be keeping this. You can tell Mercer—”

“I’m not with Mercer,” Gelethys blurts before she can take it back.

Enthir’s eyes go even wider, and Gele hadn’t thought that possible—but it has just happened.

“Oh,” he says, numbly, and then again, “Oh. You’re with her.”

 “I—yeah, I am. Listen—assuming we’re talking about the same her here—”

“I’d assume we are. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have you thrown out of the College right now.”

“Because she didn’t kill Gallus. That journal can prove it.”

He looks at Gelethys, and then back at the journal, Gallus’s journal. He does not look back at her when he says, “And Karliah thought of me.”

“She said you were an old friend of his. Gallus’s, that is. And that you never liked Mercer.”

“Of course not, the man is and always has been a royal pain in the Green-damned…” Enthir shakes his head. “But at least he’s not a murderer.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“You… aren’t trying to say…”

“I’m not trying. I’m saying. And I’m saying that, after Mercer tried to murder me for having the misfortune to be incapacitated during his latest confrontation with Karliah, and after Karliah saved my life, I’m a lot more willing to try trusting her at the moment.”

“That…” Enthir sighs, and opens the journal again. “If this was penned by Gallus in truth—and I’m inclined to believe it was, given that he was one of about three people in Skyrim at the time who could even recognize this script—then you’re right. It likely will contain clues to whether Karliah killed him, or…”

“She didn’t. ”

“You can’t be sure of that, not based solely off her word. Still—if there is truth to be found, it will be in this book. Which means you’ll have to find the stubborn bastard he learned it from… in a manner of speaking.”

Gelethys gestures vaguely for him to keep going.

“Calcelmo is the name you’re looking for. Court wizard of Markarth. Dwemer enthusiast—and as with most things Dwemer, many things Falmer go hand in hand with it, though I heard quite a bit of complaint from Gallus about how his Falmer research was more of a footnote.”

“Falmer… so that journal is written in…?”

“Falmeris script, yes. Before they became the soulless monsters they are currently, they had a thriving culture… though I doubt the average thief would be interested in how they went from that to this.”

“I’m a little familiar with the situation already. And at any other time, I’d be happy to listen.” Gelethys shrugs. “Right now, I’m a bit more concerned with figuring out the truth of something slightly more recent.”

“Yes… of course. Year 176 of the Fourth Era was certainly a year to be remembered for many reasons, none of which were good.”

“One was. I was born that year. Anyway: Calcelmo. I can get him to translate this?”

Enthir actually laughs. Never a good sign. “Absolutely not, mer’s an asshole. You’ll have to find his notes and bring them back to me. Ideally, as soon as possible, because this isn’t going to be a quick or easy job even with those.”

“...I’m guessing by find you mean steal.”

He shrugs. “Find, steal, make a copy, so long as I have something to work with. Take the journal with you, make sure you get the right notes. That won’t be an issue for you, will it?”

Gelethys sighs, and accepts the journal back. “Nope. Anything else?”

“Tell Karliah…” Enthir pauses, then shakes his head. “Actually, no. First, let’s make sure she isn’t lying about this, too.”

“If she isn’t lying about this—and I believe her—then she isn’t lying about any of it.”

“I doubt it’s as clear-cut as that. Listen… Gele, wasn’t it? Our line of work isn’t black and white, never has been. Honor among thieves is useful, to an extent, but too much… and you’ll end up like Gallus. Be careful what—and who —you trust.”  

“Thank you very much for the unwarranted and unwanted advice, but I’d like to inform you I grew up in Mournhold. I trust everyone, to an extent—and no one beyond that.” Gelethys bows, with one hand held behind her back. In that one hand, she prepares a spell. “I’ll be back. Lovely meeting you, Enthir.”

With that, she casts the spell—and in an instant, she’s back outside with Faralda the magical gatekeeper.

“Oh, hello again,” Faralda says. “How did it go?”

Gelethys shrugs carelessly, and plasters her smile on again. “I’ll be back in a week or so. Be seeing you.”

Karliah is less than thrilled to hear what it is that Enthir wants, and equally happy though not particularly surprised to hear that he trusts her about as much as most people do.

“Honestly, someone giving me even one chance to prove it wasn’t me is more than most people are willing to try,” Karliah remarks dryly, while they’re cutting cross-country from Winterhold to Dawnstar. “I’m impressed you were able to convince him to help us at all.”

“I’m annoyed and a little pissed that I wasn’t able to convince him of more,” Gelethys replies curtly. “It seems like… well, nobody even likes Mercer, but everyone is still willing to trust his word over yours.”

“He got back to the Guild first. His side of the story spread before I could even speak mine, and by then…” Karliah sighs. “It was too late before I even had a chance.”

“That’s utter guarshit. The others should have at least listened to your side.”

“They might have, if it was anything but Gallus’s murder. And… it wasn’t that simple.” Karliah looks at her, indigo eyes shining with unwept tears beneath her hood. “His death sent the guild into disarray. Factions rose up, the leaders of each vying to be his replacement. I used the chaos to cover my tracks, and that turned out to be the right decision, but I can’t help but wonder if…”

“No way back to the past, now,” Gelethys says softly. “No matter how much we want there to be.”

Karliah smiles her mournful smile. “No, and there never will be. The only thing we can do is push forward. The only thing I can do is make sure that Mercer’s actions catch up with him, in the end… whatever the cost is for me.”

Beneath her own hood, looking out at the Sea of Ghosts to their right, Gelethys can’t quite keep herself from grimacing. “We’ll bring Mercer down. And after that… I look forward to working with you on slightly lower-stakes jobs.”

“Likewise, I suppose. Though I must ask—why do you trust me? You’ve seen how, and why, most others don’t.”

“It isn’t obvious?” Gelethys shrugs. “Never liked Mercer, you saved my life, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have any family outside Skyrim or Morrowind I can stay with. And I can’t go back to Morrowind. So.”

“Yes, that justifies working with me. It doesn’t justify trusting me.”

“Sure it does. Besides, I’m a great judge of character.”

“I don’t know enough about you to dispute that, but I feel like I have to somehow.”

“Yeah, get back to me when you actually have something. In the meantime…” Gelethys squints at the rocky shore up ahead. “How close are we to Dawnstar?”

“Not very,” comes the slightly amused answer. 

From Dawnstar, the road goes south to Whiterun, and then west to Markarth. Markarth is… a lovely city, if you like feeling constantly like you’re too exposed and too crowded in at the same time, with a side of distinctly unnerving townspeople and a woman actually getting stabbed right in front of Gelethys while she’s out looking for supplies.

“The Reach belongs to the Forsworn!” He’d shouted right before, very unsuccessfully, trying to escape the guards. Now, Gelethys is just… staring.

“What the thrice-damned fuck did I just witness,” she mutters to herself, not expecting a response.

“No clue, meself,” says someone next to her. Human man, neat warpaint, looks too nervous to actually be telling the truth about knowing nothing. He holds out a folded up piece of paper. “I, um, think you dropped this.”

“No, I didn’t? Also, your hand is shaking.”

The man blanches. “Look, maybe you should have it anyway. Looks important.” He shoves the note into Gele’s hands and says, right before all but running away, “I’ve got to go.”

Gelethys is, quite honestly, even more confused now. But she unfolds the note anyway. And, perhaps too curious for her own good, she reads it.

This is absolutely something she shouldn’t get involved in. Karliah had explicitly said not to get herself into trouble in Markarth, but also, she’s curious now. What—or probably who— are the Forsworn? Why would they want to murder some random woman who had been, to all appearances, just buying jewelry and minding her own business?

Besides, if all else fails—she set a recall spell to the inn room. She’s confident that she can get out of any trouble she gets herself into with curiosity.

She could not, in fact, get herself out of the trouble she got herself into with curiosity. Mainly because, when the guards tried to arrest her, she tried to recall on the spot—and completely missed the shield bashed into her head until she woke up in Cidhna Mine with a throbbing headache and magicka-draining bracers locked firmly onto her arms.

So she may have messed up. A little.

Maybe a lot.

The good news is, she knows who the Forsworn are now! The bad news is, now Eltrys is dead, she’s been framed for it, and she’s stuck in prison with more than a few self-proclaimed Forsworn.

Except she isn’t. Not for long. The King of the Forsworn is here too—and a little convincing that now is a great time to stage the first ever prison break from Cidhna Mine goes a long way. 

Karliah is, of course, waiting for them. She nods to the King in Rags as they part ways, then drags Gelethys off to the side with a hissed, “What were you thinking?”

“Do you really want to hear the answer to that question?” Gelethys asks in return.

She sighs. “Not really, no. But given how much you’ve managed to upset the balance of the Reach in the span of two days—”

“Two days?”

“Yes, it’s Turdas, as I was saying—”

“Shit, I was out for longer than I thought. You’re sure it’s Turdas?”

“I am positive it is Turdas and that explains why you look like you’ve been hit by a rampaging mammoth at the moment. Anyway, unless you want to be caught up in Madanach’s vengeance—which, at another time, I wouldn’t mind helping with—we need to leave now.”

“I… okay.” Gelethys blinks. Her head still hurts, but not so much that she doesn’t remember why they actually came to the Oblivion-damned city called Markarth. “Wait. Calcelmo’s notes—”

“Taken care of while I was trying to figure out where you’d up and disappeared to. The notes themselves were carved into a stone tablet, so I improvised. Don’t worry about that. The absolute last thing we need right now is to be caught up in a rapidly destabilizing Hold.”

“Right. From what I can tell—the Forsworn seem fairly justified, though?”

“You will never hear me deny that,” Karliah mutters bitterly. “Let’s get out of here.”

And so they do—but not before being spotted by someone quite unwelcome. The thief in question, who had otherwise been having a rather lovely night, stares after them for a long moment in disbelief. He shakes his head, but that doesn’t change what he saw.

Betrayed and thoroughly disappointed—he’d thought Gelethys was dead, and instead she’s been working with the enemy all along—Brynjolf slips out of the city a different way. 

At least Markarth will be less of a pisshole the next time he’s here, now that the Forsworn are no longer controlled by those bastard Silver-Bloods. Still—that doesn’t change what he saw.

A part of him wishes it did. Evidently, he isn’t as good a judge of character as he thought. He’d trusted Karliah, once. He’d trusted Gelethys once, too.

Chapter Text

“Two weeks?” Gelethys all but shouts. Enthir and Karliah both glare at her. It is Karliah’s glare that makes her repeat, more quietly, “Two weeks? You can’t be serious.”

“I am, I’m afraid, quite serious,” Enthir says mildly. “I still have to decipher that Green-bitten prick Calcelmo’s notes—which is not going to be easy, as what you have given me seems to be something written in Falmeris and the same something written in Dwemeris. I’ll have to decipher the Dwemeris first, hope that both passages do indeed have the same content, and then try to decipher Gallus’s dubiously legible handwriting.”

“Dubiously… it looked fine to me?”

Karliah laughs and shakes her head. “Just because he’s not here doesn’t mean he’s getting away with how messy that is. You don’t need to act like it’s neat on my account.”

“But it didn’t look that bad, really…” Gelethys frowns in response to the nearly identical incredulous looks she gets, and concedes the point. Maybe it’s a good thing neither of them have ever seen her handwriting. “Okay, sure. Two weeks. What are we supposed to do during that?”

“That is very much not my problem,” and Enthir sounds way too damn cheerful about that fact. “Could always try your hand at mercenary work. I hear the Jarl’s offering a reward for recovering some important heirloom of his?” 

“Some important heir—sure. Fine. Okay, I’m going to be upstairs getting absolutely shitfaced if anyone needs me.” And, on that note, she makes a beeline for the inn’s common room.

The bar isn’t empty, which is a surprise at this time of day. Still, whatever the heavily armored traveler has to get shitfaced about as well, it’s not Gele’s damn business and she won’t pry into his if he doesn’t pry into hers. She pulls out the stool next to him—there’s only two seats at the bar—and waves the bartender over.

“What can I get for you today, miss?” The bartender asks.

“Do you have any mead that isn’t Black-Briar?” Gelethys asks in return, because while she isn’t that concerned with taste at the moment, she’d also rather not put any extra coin into Maven’s coffers if she can avoid it.

“Uh… we’ve got a couple cases of Honningbrew in the back?”  

“Please. That stuff’s actually tolerable when I’m not drunk already.”

The other mer at the bar, already nursing his own bottle of ale, audibly snorts as the bartender goes to find it. “Good taste. Can’t say I’m the biggest fan of either—”

“But Black-Briar literally tastes like horker piss and I’d know,” Gelethys finishes. “Please don’t ask how I know that.”

He nods, still not turning his head to fully look at her. “You… sound familiar. Have we met somewhere?”

Gelethys freezes. “Um… if we have, it’s not what you—”

“Gele! Of course!” He pulls down the hood he’s wearing, revealing bright red eyes, a grinning face, and a messy head of thick black curls. “Hey, it’s good to see you! What in Oblivion are you doing in Winterhold?”

“Gael?” Gelethys asks, though it isn’t as if this could be anyone else. Not unless Gael’s got a secret twin she doesn’t know about. It’s with this in mind that she lets her hand fall from the sword that isn’t hers. “Uh, good to see you too. What are you doing in Winterhold? Weren’t you going to join up with the—”

“Shh,” he says sharply, and then, quieter, “I did, eventually. I’m—” He spreads his hands dramatically, wriggling his fingers to somehow emphasize his point. “—undercover.”

Gelethys raises an eyebrow. “You’re undercover. You, Samarys Gaelis, are undercover.”

“Which is why I’m in my old armor,” he clarifies unhelpfully, pulling his hood back up. 

“You didn’t have armor the last time I saw you. Just that cape of yours—” 

“Which is unfortunately a little too distinctive. But yeah, joining the Companions for a while paid off. What have you been up to for the past… almost a year?”

“Um… things. Odd jobs here and there. Made some friends, pissed off some important people, you know, the usual. It really is good to see you.”

Her cousin smiles, and claps her on the shoulder. “You too! Hey… you’re still good with that sword, right? Are you busy?”

The instinctive answer she should give is yes, of course, but it occurs to her before the words can leave her mouth that she isn’t, actually. Whatever he’s got planned can’t possibly take longer than two weeks… and it would definitely be more enjoyable than kissing Jarl arse by going looking for whatever thing got stolen from him. 

It’s quite possibly going to be significantly more dangerous, too, but since when has that, literally ever, given Gelethys pause? Life’s too short to not fuck around and find out.

“Honestly? Not very,” Gelethys admits. “A friend of mine and I came here to get something translated. Turns out it’s going to take a bit longer than we thought. I’d have to double-check with her to see if she’s okay, but—”

“Oh, a friend , huh?” Gael laughs.

“I mean, yeah? I don’t think she’s interested in me like that. Although I’ll admit I wouldn’t mind if she was.” Gelethys shrugs easily. “But yeah, she’s really good with a bow. So what do you need people for?”

“I need to find something… important… in a Dwemer ruin,” Gael says at last. “And of course, get it and myself out in one piece. I know I can trust you not to tell anyone what we’re doing down there, and I’ll trust your judgment on your friend, it’s—really important that you don’t tell anyone about this.”

“Uh… sure? What is this, some secret weapon for the Empire?”

“...sure,” Gael says unconvincingly, which means no. That’s interesting. What would he be searching for if not for the Imperials? “Listen, I don’t want to talk about it in civilization, but—I can promise you and anyone else you think I can trust as much of whatever we find down there as any of us can carry out. I just need one thing, and for this to be kept quiet. I’ll explain once we’re on the way. Are you in?”

“Probably,” Gelethys says after a moment’s thought. “Let me go find—”

“We’re in,” Karliah says, and both mer at the bar turn to look at her. “Hello. Sorry, I would have said something earlier, but…” 

“It’s all good! So, uh, this is my cousin, Sa—”

“Gael,” he cuts in, and mouths the words, undercover, remember?

“...Gael, yeah, sure. Gael, this is my friend…”

“Kar,” Karliah offers. “That is short for something, as I’m sure Gael is—but I’ll wait to decide on whether or not I want to trust you with that.”

“That’s fair,” Gael says. He holds out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Kar! So… uh, I probably should have said, but this isn’t going to be a short trip probably. A week at least, maybe two.”

Karliah looks at Gelethys, and for good reason. This is almost too good to be true.

“I mean, it’s this or go suck up to the Jarl, or find something else to do for the next couple weeks,” Gelethys says with a shrug. “I trust him. And I’d rather not be super bored, so… I’m going, at least. If you don’t want to—” 

“We’re in,” Karliah says again, with a pointed look at Gelethys this time. “Though it is a little late to set out today, unless your Dwemer ruin is close by.”

“It’s… fairly close? I’ve got it on a map.”

In the end, the executive decision is made to set out the next day, and so the newly formed group of three does. It is an unusually clear day, and so it takes about an hour to get far enough from Winterhold that neither the town itself nor the college can be seen from a distance.

It is only when Winterhold is out of sight entirely that Gael takes a deep breath, turns to his companions, and says, “Alright. Explanation time. So… Gele, you know I’m Legion.”

“Obviously,” Gelethys replies. “But this isn’t for them, is it?”

“...was I that obvious?” Gael winces as Karliah gives him a particularly unimpressed look. “Don’t answer that. Anyway, I think there’s something I can show you that will explain why I’m undercover far better than anything I say can…”

He turns towards a nearby cliff face, takes a deep breath, and—shouts. No, he Shouts . The force that comes out of his mouth is potent enough to make the ground shake and spook quite a few birds in the area—it is not just a mere shout, lowercase, but a Shout, uppercase.

The ground shakes, and the words that come out of Gael’s mouth—they aren’t anything Gelethys recognizes, but they’re definitely words, in a language she’s never heard of: “FUS RO DAH!”

“That was very cool,” Gelethys says cheerfully. “I have absolutely no idea what that was.”

“Fortunately, I do,” Karliah cuts in. “You don’t live in Skyrim all your life without hearing the legends of Dragonborn—particularly not when everyone thinks there is one. Apparently this time they were right.”

“Yeah…” Gael laughs nervously. “It was in Frost Fall. You probably heard.”

“I don’t know how anyone couldn’t hear without being quite literally deaf.”

“Dragon… what now?” Gelethys asks. “Don’t tell me you think dragons exist too, Gael.”  

“Don’t tell you—what?” Gael blinks. “You’re not serious. You can’t be serious.”   

“I believe she’s serious,” Karliah says. The distinctly unimpressed and disappointed look has changed targets now. “Which is honestly quite ridiculous.”

“Gele, I’ve killed like…” He counts on his fingers. “Four. Of course they exist, they’re constantly trying to kill me because I apparently pissed off the one who destroyed Helgen by existing myself.”

“Okay, but how do you know they aren’t big cliff racers?” Gelethys asks, more earnestly this time.

“I—I know what a cliff racer looks like, Gele.”

“Big mutant cliff racers.”

“Cliff racers can’t destroy things with their voices!”

“Big, mutant, magic cliff racers.”

“Shadows preserve us,” Karliah mumbles under her breath. “Gelethys—”

“Show me a dragon. You won’t be able to. They don’t exist.”

“You’re going to wish you didn’t say that,” Gael replies, “but sure. Happily. I’ll be surprised if one doesn’t show up on our way to or back from Blackreach. But… yeah. So, funny story, I need an Elder Scroll to save the world, and there might be one somewhere in this Dwemer ruin. Any questions?”

“Several,” Karliah mutters. “You’re doing this on a might?”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Gelethys says after a moment, “as far as his side of the family goes, he’s pretty normal. I mean, my da swore up and down that his cousin—Gael’s uncle—was the Nerevarine.”

If you listen to the average Imperial scholar, Dwemer ruins come across as magical places where fantasy and fun come to life, where even the most comedically incompetent of academics can uncover a treasure trove of knowledge and—well, treasure. The average Imperial scholar, not coincidentally, has never once actually set foot inside a single Dwemer ruin. The ones who visit Dwemer ruins, unprepared for what lies within, are the ones that no one ever listens to again. 

Because, obviously, they’re dead.

One does not simply walk into a Dwemer ruin. It’s far smarter to sneak into one, as it is far smarter to sneak into any unfamiliar situation, to give yourself time to figure out what the situation is going to be like. If it’s a social situation, you can never go wrong with acting dumber than you are, but no matter what you still shouldn’t rush into things.

Particularly not when the given things are Dwemer ruins. And yet Gael’s approach to pretty much any situation, Dwemer ruins included, is an indiscriminately stupid one: rush right in. He wouldn’t know subtlety if it hit him over the head with a metal support beam. At least he’s distracting, and at least he can handle all the unwanted attention he’s attracting, but…

Karliah sums it up best, after about the fourth or fifth time Gele’s charming cousin runs yelling into a room and draws the attention of every damn construct in said room in the process, by muttering, “He’s… loud.”

“He’s dumb,” Gelethys agrees. She hurls a fireball at a spider getting too close to Gael with one hand, and tucks some stray strands of flyaway hair behind her ear with the other.

“I heard that!” Gael kicks the spider Gelethys just hit backwards, then spins in place and slices two more in two with his sword.

“Great! You were meant to hear it.”

“I was going to say I couldn’t imagine how you two were related, but…” Karliah looks at Gelethys again. “On second thought, I can see the resemblance.”

Gelethys would be offended if she wasn’t smiling. Instead, she grins back and teases, a lighter note to her voice than before, “Takes one to know one.”

Blackreach, for lack of a better description, just kind of fucking sucks. It’s deep enough underground that the very air itself has gone stale, it’s big enough that just getting to Blackreach takes the better part of a day, and it’s a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim, so there’s extra motivation to make sure someone’s keeping watch at all times, because Falmer.

Blackreach is interesting, sure, from a research perspective—but the remnants of the last ill-fated research expedition to come here keep Gelethys from being too interested in the research value of the place. It’s pretty, in a certain way, what with the various glowing mushrooms and glowing chaurus eggs and glowing basically-everything-really.

But Blackreach still fucking sucks, and literally no force on Nirn can change Gele’s mind on that—particularly not when it becomes immensely clear that finding an Elder Scroll, down here, is going to take a while.

The first night—at least, what Gelethys assumes is probably night based on all three members of this fairly impromptu expedition to find an Elder Scroll so her dumb cousin can save the world—Gael volunteers for first watch. Gelethys takes the second, and it— thankfully— passes without incident.

Karliah takes the third, which in itself is unremarkable. The issue comes when Gelethys retreats to her own bedroll, closes her eyes, and fails miserably at actually returning to the blissful embrace of sleep. It’s too cold, too dark in all the wrong ways.

It’s her first few days in Skyrim all over again, but turned up to eleven. Gelethys rolls over onto one side, staring into the dying embers of the fire—but that’s even worse. She tries her other side. Darker, but no better.

Ugh. She’d take Mournhold’s sewers over this. She’d take the Dwemer ruin connected to Mournhold’s sewers over this, because at least there aren’t any Falmer there. Just long-deactivated machines lying there gathering dust for the rest of eternity, and probably at least a couple working ones hiding somewhere. Dwemer ruins are fascinating, in theory. But it’s different when it’s the ruin underneath the broken statue of Almalexia, strictly off-limits to all except researchers and even then only with explicit permission. 

It’s different when it’s not so far from home.

As she stares out into the darkness, tears well up in her eyes. She blinks hard, and wipes them away before they can fall. And, affixing a smile back onto her face, she shuts her eyes.

She gives up on sleep, before too long. Karliah glances up as Gelethys takes a seat on the other side of the dimming fire, and raises a single dark eyebrow in a clear question.

“Not tired,” Gelethys lies, though she doesn’t put much effort into it. She stares into what’s left of the flames. “Do you mind if I just… talk, for a bit?”

The eyebrow raises itself further. “I’m surprised you bothered to ask.”

Gelethys laughs quietly. “Yeah, I know I come across as a lot sometimes… most of the time. Sometimes, it’s just… have you ever been to Morrowind?”

“Not personally,” Karliah says. “The stories I’ve heard don’t do very much to make me want to.”

“Ha, yeah. Who in their right mind would want to go there? Especially now, what with the ash storms and Red Mountain and everything, but… well, I guess the answer to my question is someone born there. Someone who grew up almost perpetually in danger, to the point where it takes a lot to faze you anywhere else.”

“Didn’t you say you grew up in Mournhold? That isn’t on Vvardenfell.”

She shrugs. “Well, yeah, I was a city girl, but Mournhold had its own share of troubles and then some. Remind me to tell you about the sewers sometime. But anyway, starting a few years before I left, I started taking on odd jobs outside and beyond. Vvardenfell… as long as you don’t feel the ground shaking, hear a racer screeching, or see anything approaching from above or otherwise, it’s really not as bad as the Empire makes it out to be.”

“Typical Imperial propaganda, or…?”

“Typical Imperial propaganda, for the most part. Probably a fair bit of typical Great House politics, too. You make Vvardenfell look like more of a pisshole than it is, there’ll be less people to look over your shoulder.”

Karliah makes a noise of understanding at that. “Not all that different from Skyrim, then.”

“Well, I haven’t seen a cliff racer yet. Or—” Gelethys makes air quotes with her fingers. “—or a  ‘dragon’ for that matter.”

Rather wisely, Karliah decides not to poke that particular bear at the moment. “True. The wildlife in Skyrim do tend to largely leave you alone so long as you keep your distance.”

“So does the wildlife in Morrowind! If keeping your distance means not going within like… five miles of an alit nest. Or within ten of a racer one.”

“Somehow, I think bears are a little less territorial than that,” Karliah says wryly. “Though… I thought cliff racers had been wiped out in Morrowind?”

“They were in Vvardenfell, for a while. Everything else got more aggressive with them gone. The Temple basically paid the ‘saint’ who eradicated them on the island to not do the same in mainland Morrowind.” Gelethys grins slightly. “Or so I’ve heard—but I’d trust that particular source. At least when it comes to the Temple’s fuck-ups.”

Gelethys pauses, then, and looks to Karliah in a wordless question. The other womer nods, which is her first mistake: Gele doesn’t shut up about Morrowind and Mournhold until Gael rouses himself and rejoins them.

Karliah’s second mistake is, the next night, joining Gelethys when it’s her turn to take the third watch and asking her to pick up where she left off.