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“So we were all exploring the Tower of Mzark, then,” said Teldryn, throwing another piece of drywood on the fire, “and it sounds like we all roughly were from the same place in time.”
“Maybe give or take a few hours,” said the Teldryn next to him. “It’s not exactly simple to tell time in Blackreach.”
“Right,” said the first, “but we all remember setting out on the 28th of Frostfall. No one said anything out there like ‘no, it was the 15th of Rain’s Fall.’”
A third Teldryn, hunched over a large pack, raised his head. “Well, we all said Frostfall, but that’s not all of us, is it?" He nodded off towards the figure standing guard at the alcove exit. “He hasn’t said anything one way or another.”
The two Teldryns at the fire fell silent. For the three of them, it had been relatively simple. They had all run into each other at the base of the tower. On hearing such a surreal familiarity to each one’s voice, they had agreed to remove their helmets at the count of three, and that moment had exploded in heated confusion before they had come to understand that something had happened.
This Teldryn had just stood by the whole time, unmoved and unmoving, while they argued and debated if this was real or some strange use of illusion magic. Only after they had come to an uneasy understanding did he acknowledge them with a nod.
“And you,” one Teldryn had said, turning to him with fire in his eyes. “Are you the me who just doesn’t have a tongue?"
His only response to that was to remove his helmet, and coldly stare back with his one remaining eye.
That eye was now focused on the broader cavern of Blackreach as he leaned against a cave wall, arms loose at his sides, one hand resting on his sword hilt.
“It was autumn,” he said, suddenly, without turning to face them. “Might’ve been Frostfall. Can’t say I’ve kept track.”
The two Teldryns at the fire exchanged a glance, but said nothing.
“So we have that settled, at least,” said the Teldryn picking around inside his pack. “I’d guess we were all likely hired by the same person for the same job, too.”
“The Last Dragonborn, or so they say,” said one of the Teldryns at the fire. “Came for the Elder Scroll. Said he needed it to learn some lost Shout from the past.”
Teldryn had been nodding along, rummaging through his pack as the other Teldryn spoke. Now he glanced up with a raised eyebrow. “‘He’?"
“Yes, he,” said Teldryn, squinting at him. “Big orc with a warhammer. Hits hard, Shouts harder. Not that popular outside the strongholds, but he pays well and he’s good at what he does.”
Teldryn tried to hold in a burst of laughter; it escaped him as an undignified snort. “No? Far from it—the Last Dragonborn is a tiny little Breton archmage. Trust me, she’s quite well-loved.”
They considered this a moment, then turned to the other Teldryn at the fire. He was grinning ear to ear.
“All right, I can see where this is going,” said the first Teldryn. “So what’s your Dragonborn, then?"
Teldryn leaned forward on his arms, resting his chin in his hands. “You know the kind of Khajiit that looks just like a housecat? Does all the spying?"
The first Teldryn’s brows raised. Teldryn at his pack stopped his rummaging, eyes wide with wonder.
“Well,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, and then shattered the moment with a shit-eating grin. “She’s not one of those, but she is a Khajiit. Master of the Thieves Guild, as if no one saw that one coming.”
The other Teldryn at the fire shot him a glare that was half annoyance and half envy. “Damn it, you actually had me going there.”
“You gave me an engraved invitation,” replied Teldryn with a smirk. “Would’ve been a shame to waste it.”
“And what about yours?" asked Teldryn, face turned towards the alcove entrance as he drew out some dried meat and a few wedges of cheese.
The one-eyed Teldryn said nothing.
“Did you come with a Last Dragonborn?" asked a Teldryn at the fire. “Or did you come here your—”
He pushed himself off the wall, suddenly, his single eye piercing the distance.
“Put the rations away,” he said, sharply, “and put the fire out.”
Teldryn already had thrown the meat and cheese back in their place and hastily sealed the pack before the other had finished his sentence, but one of the two Teldryns at the fire gave him a skeptical look as the other moved to smother the fire.
“I doubt anyone could see the smoke at this—”
“It’s not seeing you need to worry about,” snapped the sentry. “They’ll smell it.”
“Falmer aren’t that terrifying,” he mumbled, coughing slightly as a bit of smoke from the extinguished fire blew into his face.
The tension did not leave Teldryn’s figure as his eye narrowed, peering at something the rest of them could not see.
“Too late,” he said, throwing his helmet back on. “They know we’re here. Get ready to fight.”
The other three Teldryns dutifully tossed their helmets back on, drew their swords, and—in one unified arcane gesture—had the same spell fizzle out in each one’s free hand.
Teldryn tilted his head at the Teldryn next to him in confusion. “Fire atronach?"
He nodded, and turned to the third. “Yours, too?"
The third nodded back.
“You can’t call on Oblivion here,” said the one-eyed Teldryn. “This is Blackreach.”
Teldryn huffed. “What does that have to do with—”
He stopped, staring out the alcove entrance. The air along the cavern floor was wavering, shimmering, like the air over the lava flows of Molag Amur.
It hadn’t been doing that when they set up camp. The shimmer was also moving closer, and fast.
He fell behind the one-eyed Teldryn, turning back over one shoulder to the other Teldryns. “Something’s coming. Invisible.”
“Since when do the Falmer use invisibility like that?"
“They have enough chaurus eggs,” said the third Teldryn. “Invisibility potions aren’t out of the question, if they prepared enough in advance.”
“They’re blind,” said Teldryn. “Why would they think to do it? How would they even know it worked? And wouldn’t it only last a few seconds, anyway?"
Before anyone could answer, the shimmer was at the entrance to the alcove. A single blink, and the one-eyed Teldryn had moved, diving under a blur of bending light and movement. A burst of flame flared out from his hand into the warp at close range.
It let out a shriek that seemed to pierce the whole of Blackreach, and shattered like glass.
The sight that replaced it was, at first glance, familiar: a great chaurus mount sporting a short, hunched rider with long, gangly arms. Then Teldryn saw the shine of a brass helmet and cuirass, and the gleam of brass plates over the chaurus' hindquarters. Another fraction of a second, and he realized the chaurus had no head—the rider had no legs—
The one-eyed Teldryn slashed upward at the underbelly of the thing. It cried out as the chitin cracked wide. Red blood poured out from the wound as brass spiders poured into the alcove from either side of its plated abdomen.
Teldryn slashed a spider in two, sending each half flying in a spray of brass gears and parts.
Teldryn kicked a spider hard into the cave wall, its upper housing shattering with a lightning arc and the sound of cracking crystal.
Teldryn stabbed a spider through the weakest part of its casing—a single strike through the edge seams. It went limp and dark before he’d drawn the blade out.
They could handle brass spiders. Spiders were an almost mindless reprieve. It was no danger to glance away from them to gawk at the incomprehensible dance of the last Teldryn and the thing in brass.
Teldryn looked up to see the other Teldryn’s sword slice off one of its arms. It roared as the limb fell to the ground with a wet thud. The other arm was already gone, leaving only a pair of gushing stumps and enraged gyrations of its almost humanoid chest. He caught a glimpse of one of the arms on the ground before he had to turn back to the spiders. The exposed skin was far from pale—if anything, it was golden, like Altmer, but darker in tone.
As endless as they might have seemed at first, the Teldryns did eventually run out of spiders. The three found themselves standing beside each other, ankle-deep in broken gears, watching the creature as it fell back and curled in on itself protectively. A rattling hiss emanated from behind the bearded faceplate of the brass helmet. The last Teldryn’s gaze remained fixed on it, sword ready in one hand and flames curling around the fingers of the other.
Suddenly, it unfurled itself fully, lifting itself high on its own hindquarters. Its chaurus legs clawed menacingly at the air. The head reared back, and it let out a sound that was neither cry nor shriek nor hiss: a pure and unwavering tone, impossibly high-pitched, that enveloped their surroundings and everything in it. Teldryn grit his teeth through a wave of pain and struggled to remain standing: his own bones were vibrating inside his flesh.
The last Teldryn had already leapt into action—very literally, tearing his way up the thing’s body with a speed that seemed almost inhuman. His feet somehow found purchase on the clawing legs that swiped at him, springing upwards like they were the rungs of a ladder. In a flash, he had reached the torso of the thing and grasped at the face of its helmet with one hand. Both Teldryn and the torso were engulfed in a ball of fire and a cloud of black smoke as the tone was cut off by a scream of pain and the hiss of burning flesh.
It teetered for a moment before it fell backwards, hitting the ground with the sound of heavy brass on stone. When the smoke cleared, the one-eyed Teldryn was straddling the thing’s unmoving chest, and he shakily rose to his feet.
One of the Teldryns stepped forward, slowly approaching him and the body of the thing. Light tendrils of smoke continued to curl out from the eyelets of the brass helmet.
The one-eyed Teldryn coughed, patting out an ember still smouldering on the point of his scarf. “Well, that was different. The Organs don’t tend to mix and match like that.”
“The Organs,” said the other Teldryn, flatly.
“They prefer to repurpose armor from the removed parts of the chaurus,” he continued, staring down at the thing’s corpse as he circled behind its head. “It’s an efficiency thing, I’ve been told.”
“What is an Organ?” asked Teldryn, shrill with confusion.
He looked up at the other Teldryn, head tilted at a perplexed angle.
“You act like you’ve never seen a dwarf before,” he said.
It took a minute for this to sink in.
“No,” said Teldryn, more violently than he meant to, “I have not, in fact, ever seen a dwarf before.”
“That’s fortunate for you,” replied the other Teldryn. He stepped over the dwarf’s head, walking back towards the camp. “Gather everything up that you can, and make it fast. It’s not safe to stay here anymore.”
Somehow the next opportunity they had to stop and rest was an abandoned Dwemer house to the north—the one-eyed Teldryn’s idea, even.
“Can’t fault the skepticism,” he said, as he picked the ancient lock open, “but trust me, it’s better than the open air. Dwarves don’t live in houses.”
It was the Blackreach equivalent of a one-room cottage. Most of the space was taken up by a stone double bed. There were no windows, and every inch smelled of ancient mold. A thick layer of undisturbed dust covered all surfaces. There were tombs that had fresher air than this.
Still. As the one-eyed Teldryn shut the door and latched it behind him, Teldryn could have sworn he heard him let out a sigh of relief.
He settled into an ancient chair, sliding his helmet off and setting it down on the table beside him.
A few moments of awkward silence passed before one of the other Teldryns placed his helmet and pack on the table, reaching into the pack to grab a handful of cheese wedges.
“Where I'm from, the Dwemer all mysteriously disappeared,” he said, holding up a wedge. “No one knows what happened to them. No one can even agree if they disappeared all at once or gradually over time. The only thing anyone knows is that sometime in the First Era, there just weren’t any Dwemer anymore.”
He tossed the wedge to one of the standing Teldryns, who caught it in one hand.
“Sounds about right to me,” said that Teldryn as he pulled his helmet off and set it down on the bed. “That’s the part everyone knows, at least. According to Vivec, they did all vanish at once, and Kagrenac himself made it happen.”
“Vivec wrote a lot of things,” replied the Teldryn who threw the wedge. “Doesn’t mean it’s all true.”
“Fair point,” he said, pausing to take a bite of his cheese. “Pretty sure he wasn’t lying about that one, though. All in all, he was surprisingly helpful.”
Teldryn raised an eyebrow. “You talk like you’ve met him.”
Another bite. “I have.”
Before Teldryn could respond, the other Teldryn had lowered the cheese, pulled the chitin gauntlet off his other hand, and held his hand up. A small ring caught the light.
Teldryn approached the hand slowly, eyes narrowing in a confused squint at the ring on his finger. It had a silver band with a single decorative fixture: a crescent moon and a five-pointed star.
In one moment of impossible realization, Teldryn went from the squint to wide-eyed disbelief, a hand rising to cover his mouth.
“You’re the Nerevarine,” he eventually managed to say, awe leaking out through the cracks between his fingers.
The Teldryn with the ring just grinned, like a proud cat with a very large skeever in its mouth.
“Don’t get too cocky,” said the third Teldryn, pulling his own gauntlet off. “Even that’s not as special as you’d think.” He held up his hand: an identical ring glistened in the dim light.
He approached the first Nerevarine, hand up before his face. The Teldryn with the cheese’s gaze shot back and forth between the two rings. The second Nerevarine grabbed a wedge from his hands and took a bite, still defiantly staring down the first.
“Well,” said the first Nerevarine. “If only the Cavern of Incarnates could see us now.”
“What house were you?”
“Hm?”
“I’m not going to grill you on all seven trials,” said the second Nerevarine. “But you had to belong to one of the Five Houses, even if three called you Hortator.”
The first Nerevarine crossed his arms. His eyes swept down to the second Nerevarine’s chitin boots, and then slowly scanned back up to his face.
“Hlaalu,” he said, and took a bite of cheese.
The second snorted. “House Hlaalu? Really?”
“I was a freshly released ex-convict who’d never even been to Vvardenfell before,” said Teldryn, still chewing. “It’s not like I could have known they weren’t going to be a Great House in a few decades.” He swallowed and looked the other Nerevarine over again. “What house were you, anyway?”
“Redoran,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Teldryn rolled his eyes. “Oh, Redoran. Of course you were.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing, sera,” he said, tossing his ring hand up in an open gesture. “Very respectable. I’m sure Councilor Morvayn was thrilled to have you in Raven Rock.”
“Don’t you ‘sera’ me,” said Teldryn, sharply. “You’re me and I damn well know when I’m being an asshole.”
“Both stark-born to sire uncertain,” replied Teldryn, fingers curling into a fist, “but I’m the one that’s godless Hlaalu.”
“It’s Telvanni that’s godless,” said the one-eyed Teldryn, out of nowhere.
The three others’ eyes shot to him with a jolt, though he had not moved from the chair since he first sat down.
“For the House I had dealings with, at least, it was a point of pride.” He looked up, his eye’s gaze settling on the Teldryn carrying the cheese. “Maybe it was different for you.”
“No,” said Teldryn, tentatively holding out a wedge. “That sounds about right for House Telvanni.”
The two Nerevarines glanced at each other; the momentum of their argument was gone, replaced with an awkward self-awareness. They turned back to the one-eyed Teldryn.
“Were you—?” the second started to ask, trailing off in hesitation.
He gave no sign of having heard or noticed the question. His gaze had lowered to the wedge of cheese. He reached out slowly, taking the offered wedge with much more care than seemed necessary, and nodded to the other Teldryn in wordless thanks.
One wedge of cheese remained. Teldryn cupped it in both hands, as if softening it with his body heat. “What kind of business did you have with the Telvanni?”
Teldryn’s brow furrowed, and he glanced off to one side. “They housed the last Dwemer.”
The second Nerevarine’s eyes widened. “Yagrum Bagarn?”
He nodded.
“I guess that’s reasonably close,” said the other Nerevarine Teldryn. “Didn’t you just say that thing back there was a dwarf, though? How can he be the last one if they’re not actually gone?”
“Yagrum Bagarn was a Dwemer, not a dwarf,” replied Teldryn. “The Dwemer weren’t dwarves to start with. They became the dwarves.”
“Dwarf doesn’t mean Dwemer, then. Got it.” A pause for a small bite of cheese. “Any idea why they all became creepy chaurus centaurs, then?”
He sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “That’s just one kind of Organ. They’re not born like that. The dwarves make themselves into the different types of Organs.”
“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” said Teldryn, uncupping his hands. “Explain it to us like we’re a bunch of s’wits who have no idea what’s going on.”
His hand fell to his lap, and he nodded, glancing up to Teldryn before turning his attention to the first Nerevarine. “You said in your version that Kagrenac himself made the Dwemer vanish. Was that at Red Mountain?”
“The Battle of Red Mountain, yes,” replied Teldryn. “Kagrenac used the tools on the—” He stopped, turning to the other Nerevarine with dawning horror.
“If I had to guess,” said the one-eyed Teldryn, “then I’d suppose that in every case, Kagrenac used the tools on the Heart. When he did, the Dwemer ceased to be—one way or another.”
“I never thought it was possible for Kagrenac’s folly to have a worse outcome,” said the second Nerevarine. “Might be better to straight up die than degenerate like that.”
“They didn’t ‘degenerate’,” said Teldryn. “The dwarves are small and warped because Sotha Sil stole their time. They stay underground and avoid the surface because Almalexia turned the sun and stars against them. They’re blind because Vivec tried to show them the truth of what they’d become, and they refused to see it.”
“They didn’t seem that blind to me,” said the first Nerevarine Teldryn. “Though I suppose you’re going to tell me they make do with sound and tonal vibration and all that.”
He simply glanced back to Teldryn as the mer took his first bite of cheese. “I think I’m failing at explaining so a s’wit would understand.”
“I can still follow the thread,” replied Teldryn. “Might miss the finer details, but it’s enough to figure out the big picture.”
“And what does the picture look like to you, then?”
He chewed on a bite of cheese for a moment, eyes raised in thought.
“The Dwemer changed into the dwarves,” he said, a finger raised as if tracing his line of thought in the air, “but it doesn’t sound like the change was physical. It wasn’t like the Chimer becoming the Dunmer. Maybe the opposite of it, even.”
One of the Nerevarines raised an eyebrow.
He sighed. “I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about this, and maybe I’m completely off base, but hear me out. After the Battle of Red Mountain, Azura cursed the Chimer with red eyes and ashen skin, right?”
“If that part was different,” said the other Nerevarine, “I’d be deeply surprised.”
“My point,” said Teldryn, “is that the curse made everyone look different, changed them physically, but they weren’t different people. So it’d be the opposite of a change where—” He gestured awkwardly with the cheese. “I don’t know how to phrase it. The body might be the same, but they’re not who they used to be anymore.”
The one-eyed Teldryn leaned back in the chair, one hand raised to cover his mouth.
“A little on the nose?” asked a Nerevarine.
“You’ve got a knack for this,” he replied, flatly. His hand lowered back down to his lap; the corners of his mouth were twitching.
Surprising no one, it was the two Nerevarines who first broached the question of the bed, by way of the first Nerevarine sitting down on one side and taking off his armor.
“What are you even doing?” asked the other Nerevarine.
“Going to bed,” he replied, “and no, I’m definitely not sleeping on the floor.”
“‘Sleeping on the—’?” He crossed his arms. “Where did you even get that? We haven’t even talked about any of it yet.”
“If it’s three against one I won’t have much choice,” he said, already out of his cuirass and kicking his boots off. “Honestly, I could care less if there’s four of us crammed into the damn thing, just as long as I’m not on the floor.”
“If everyone keeps their hands to themselves, no one has to be on the floor,” replied the other Nerevarine.
“If there’s a problem,” said the third Teldryn, “I could probably sleep in between—”
Both Nerevarines shot him a glare—one heated, one icy. Ah. The wrong tack to take.
“I’ll be fine here,” said the one-eyed Teldryn, still seated in the ancient chair. “Keeping watch, just in case.”
All eyes moved to him.
“That doesn’t seem right,” said Teldryn. “You did the worst of the fighting earlier—you’re probably the most exhausted out of all of us.”
He shrugged. “It’s just making the best of the situation. I don’t sleep well with other people around.”
It still didn’t seem quite right to Teldryn, but there was something in his expression—a distant look in his one remaining eye—that told him it was better to let it be.
The arrangement ended up being the first Nerevarine in the middle, back to back with the third Teldryn. It was a bit awkward. Some kind of murmuring conversation was happening behind his head: the Nerevarines were critiquing the fine details of each other’s face tattoos.
Teldryn didn’t quite know when he drifted off to sleep. It felt like he blinked once, and the Nerevarines were suddenly silent. He sat up and glanced over at them.
Despite all the talk of “everyone keeping their hands to themselves”, the second Nerevarine had found his way to being the little spoon. That was going to be a Moment when they both woke up, certainly.
He turned towards the chair where the one-eyed Teldryn sat, and he honestly hoped to see him with his arms folded on the table, face planted on the softer parts and snoring away. Instead, he wearily met Teldryn’s gaze, eyelids heavy but still open.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Though the Nerevarines didn’t stir, Teldryn kept his answer to a shake of the head.
He swept a bit of dust off the seat of a nearby chair with his hand. “Can’t promise I’ll be much company, but you’re welcome to join me.”
The one-eyed Teldryn had kept the rest of his armor on, Teldryn noted as he settled into the second chair. His helmet laid on the table next to his pack.
A moment of silence stretched out awkwardly between them, his gaze wandering heavy-lidded to the floor.
“You normally wear a false eye, don’t you?” asked Teldryn.
His gaze shot back up, staring at him, his eye wide in spite of his exhaustion.
“Had an employer once with a missing eye,” continued Teldryn. “The socket tightens up if there’s nothing in there to hold it all in place. Kind of... moves things around. So if you know what to look for, you can tell who’s been wearing an eye patch, who’s never worn anything, and who’s just taken out a false eye.”
“A bit longer than ‘just taken out’,” said the one-eyed Teldryn. “But you’re right, otherwise.” He looked Teldryn over. “It’s not your Breton archmage who’s missing an eye, is it?”
He chuckled. “Oh, no, definitely not. Last patron before her, I'm afraid. The two couldn’t be more different if they tried. She’s the pinnacle of High Rock, he was a true Nord—”
The other Teldryn flinched. Teldryn stopped, regarding him as his eye settled somewhere around his shoulder.
“That means something to you,” said Teldryn, cautiously.
“It means a lot of things to a lot of people,” replied the one-eyed Teldryn. “Where were you going with it?”
“Animal skins and face tattoos.” His own focus remained on the other Teldryn’s face, fixed firmly on his eye. “A real traditional type.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly. He let out a puff of air somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “That’s fine.”
“You’ve had bad experiences with Nords, I take it.”
He waved this off with a hand. “The Grey Quarter will do that to you.”
“No,” said Teldryn. “Something worse than Windhelm, unless yours is drastically different.”
“It might well be,” he said, dryly. “From the sound of it, Vvardenfell certainly did better at least twice.”
“You’re a Nerevarine, too, then?”
He shook his head. “There was no Nerevarine.”
“No Nerevarine?” His brows furrowed. “Do you mean there was no Nerevarine prophecy?”
“Oh, there was a prophecy,” said Teldryn, resting his arms on his knees. “The Blades were keenly aware of it, and sent candidates to fulfill it. But no one ever did.”
“If there was no Nerevarine, does that mean there was no one to defeat Dagoth Ur?”
He slumped forward, resting his face in his hands. “No, Dagoth Ur was defeated. Just not by prophecy.”
Teldryn wrinkled his nose. “I don’t understand.”
The other Teldryn stared back at him for a moment, hands folded at his chin in thought. He lowered his hands, slipped off his left gauntlet, and held his left hand out between them, a small flame appearing in his palm to act as a light source.
From the tips of his fingers to well past where his forearm met chitin armor, his whole left arm was covered in scars—long, thin, surprisingly delicate scars, swirling and branching out like ferns emerging from below his skin. They shone with golden reflections where the flame’s light hit their surface.
“This is what I have instead of a ring,” said the one-eyed Teldryn.
Teldryn felt his brows suddenly release, rising with curiosity, and caught himself reaching up with one hand to touch it.
“It’s all right.” Though his face remained unmoving, there was a touch of something else to his voice. “You have my permission.”
Teldryn cupped the back of the other Teldryn’s wrist with one hand, tracing the lines of his forearm with the other. They were older scars, long cords softened by time, but still noticeably rigid, pressing back against his fingertips.
“To defeat Dagoth Ur, you don’t need Nerevar reborn,” said Teldryn, staring down at his own scars. “You need the tools of Kagrenac. You need Keening and Sunder, and then to use them without dying, you need Wraithguard.” He rolled his fingers tentatively, as if encountering his own hand for the first time in years. “That’s what the prophecy gated. Anyone could fight the Sixth House and the dwarves to reclaim Keening and Sunder, but Vivec had Wraithguard, and would only give it to the confirmed Nerevarine. Supposedly.”
“You had your doubts,” said Teldryn, looking up from his hand to his face.
His eye met Teldryn’s briefly, then glanced away.
“The right move for him was to give it to no one,” he said, “least of all the Empire. A Blades agent doesn’t stop being a Blades agent because he’s somehow managed to win over the Houses and the Tribes. Vivec knew Uriel Septim wanted to claim Numidium for his own.”
Teldryn nodded. “So you thought you’d have to take Wraithguard from him no matter what you did.”
“The signs were getting worse; there wasn’t any time to waste.” The flame in his palm extinguished itself, and he drew his hand back, out of Teldryn’s reach. “At least, that’s what I’d thought then.” His gaze wandered over towards the bed. “It was the wrong call. I should have at least tried, like they did.”
“Maybe your path wasn’t the same as theirs,” said Teldryn, “but you did save Morrowind.”
The other Teldryn lifted his hand to his face, covering the empty socket.
“According to Ashlander myth, it was Dagoth Ur who struck down the thing that once was Kagrenac. The Sixth House fought the Tribunal, but they also waged war against the dwarves behind the Ghost Fence. When Almalexia sought her vengeance, she said the Tribunal chose to ascend instead of destroying the Heart, because how else were they going to protect their people? Then I struck down Vivec, Dagoth Ur, Almalexia—everything keeping the dwarves in check.”
He lowered his hand back down, and looked at Teldryn.
“I didn’t save Morrowind,” he said. “I doomed it.”
A long silence filled the room. The only sound was the soft breathing of the two Teldryns in bed.
“That’s why you’re in Blackreach,” said Teldryn, quietly. “To make sure the Dragonborn prophecy turned out better.”
The look in his eye changed slightly: just enough to go from dismay to mild confusion.
“I could ask if you knew someone named Delphine,” Teldryn continued, “but I think I can already guess the answer to that.”
A wry smile crossed his face, and the look in his eye softened further. “Are you sure you aren’t the agent? Seems like I’m just hemorrhaging information left and right.”
He shrugged. “It’s just an explanation that makes sense. There are differences, but there’s a lot that’s still the same. It’s enough to fill in some details.” He glanced back to the other Teldryn, mirroring the wry smile. “Besides, I’m you: I’m naturally going to have an unfair advantage.”
That actually managed to draw a small chuckle out of him. “Maybe I should be asking you what’s happened, then. What’s the story that you’ve pieced together?”
“Heartbreaking,” replied Teldryn. “I’d honestly rather be wrong.”
The smile melted from his face, but the look in his eye remained.
“‘A true Nord’ means a lot of things to a lot of people,” he continued, “and a lot of them were expecting the Last Dragonborn to be every last one. But the prophecy’s very vague, isn’t it? Alduin’s Wall doesn’t say ‘and then the Last Dragonborn defeats Alduin’, really. It just says Alduin shows up, and then ‘the Wheel turns upon the Last Dragonborn’.”
“When did you see Alduin’s Wall?” asked the one-eyed Teldryn.
“About a month ago,” said Teldryn. “Though to be fair, it didn’t stand out as much as the leader of the Greybeards turning out to be a dragon.”
“It’s the same course of events, at least. Sky Haven, High Hrothgar, the College of Winterhold—”
“—and a madman with a key to Blackreach and directions to the Tower of Mzark.”
Teldryn stared at him for a minute, then nodded sagely. “You’re right. There’s barely even an implied promise of Alduin’s defeat in the prophecy. Enough for ballads and folklore to embellish, but you could just as easily read it as ‘there will be no more Dragonborns after this’.”
“And there’s also no promise,” said the other Teldryn, “about what kind of person the Last Dragonborn will be.”
Teldryn set his jaw, and did not reply.
“Was he alive or dead when you read the Elder Scroll?”
He rubbed at his temple with his hand. “Alive. I think. I didn’t have time to check.”
“You’re lucky that this kind of thing happened,” said Teldryn, gently. “You could have gone mad, or blind.”
“If I was mad I wouldn’t care anymore,” replied Teldryn. “And as for blind—well, the dwarves seem to manage just fine.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“I can’t know anything for sure,” said Teldryn. “For all I know, none of this is real and I did go mad and this is all some pitiful hallucination right before he—”
One of the Nerevarines mumbled in distress in his sleep. The one-eyed Teldryn’s gaze shot to the bed again, holding his breath.
The first Nerevarine’s arms tightened around the second, burying his face in the back of his neck.
“This is real,” said the other Teldryn.
He looked down. At some point—he wasn’t sure when—the other Teldryn had taken his hand up again. A warm palm laid against his; fingertips caressed the lines of his scars.
“If it is real,” he said, “then I didn’t just waste the only chance I had to make things right. I dragged three innocent people into it, too.”
Teldryn couldn’t help but grin at this. “Innocent? Really?”
“Two true Nerevarines,” said Teldryn, “and a brilliant mercenary who made himself everything he is, no prophecy needed. You’re not just innocent; you’re too good to be true.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever been accused of being wish fulfillment before,” replied Teldryn. “Also, of all the places to hallucinate—Blackreach? Really?”
“It’s where I was. Am. I don’t even know anymore.”
“Still, you could have imagined a kinder, gentler Blackreach. Maybe it’s full of talking guar or something.”
He snorted. “I can’t imagine Blackreach without dwarves. It’s just not possible.”
“But you can imagine three other Teldryn Seros,” said Teldryn, “all from places without dwarves. In great detail.”
He cast a guilty glance back towards the bed.
“They don’t need to know right away,” said Teldryn, squeezing his hand. “Eventually, yes, but it can wait until we’re somewhere safer.”
Though this was meant to be reassuring, the bags under his eye just seemed to grow deeper.
“You need to sleep.”
He shook his head slowly.
“You’re exhausted,” said Teldryn, rising to his feet. “Come on. You can keep the armor on, but you need to lie down.”
Teldryn pulled him by the hand, and he stumbled near drunkenly out of his seat.
“I can’t,” he said, wobbling as Teldryn led him to the bed. “I’ll die.”
“You’re not going to die,” said Teldryn, sitting down on the bedside. “If it helps, you can stay on the outside, but you need to sleep. You can’t just stay awake forever.”
It was hard to say if the one-eyed Teldryn was looking anywhere in particular anymore. He mumbled incoherently as he tried to sit and crumpled bonelessly onto Teldryn’s shoulder.
“Easy there,” said Teldryn, lowering the both of them down to the bed. It wasn’t easy to do with one hand—he was still clutching Teldryn’s hand, hard enough he wouldn’t have been surprised to see indents from his scars mirrored in his flesh.
They were all in the bed, now: Teldryn’s back to the Nerevarines, the one-eyed Teldryn clasping his hand and staring back at him. His eye kept drifting shut and snapping open in terror. It would settle on Teldryn’s face, and as he murmured reassurance, it would slowly start to shut again. Eventually the cycle was broken: his eye stayed closed this time, and his breath softened as he eased into sleep.
They decided over a breakfast of dried meat and bread that the Great Lift of Mzinchaleft was their best bet for getting out of Blackreach; from there they’d head northeast to Dawnstar. There was surprisingly little talk about the previous night’s sleeping arrangements—the initial Nerevarine explosion petered out on seeing the one-eyed Teldryn’s face buried in the other’s chest.
They fell into line behind the one-eyed Teldryn, following his lead north to the lift, and somehow managed to avoid drawing any Organ’s attention.
“We got lucky,” said the one-eyed Teldryn, pressing the button to lower the spears blocking the lift. “They must have thought we went towards Raldbthar and redirected the Organs there.”
“It was closer, so that makes some sense,” said Teldryn, as they stepped into the lift. “Not sure how that dwarf had enough time to send that much information to the others.”
“No one knows how they do,” replied the other Teldryn. “It’s as if once one dwarf knows something, they all know it. They all recognize Calcelmo on sight, for instance.”
“Oh, Calcelmo,” said one of the Nerevarine Teldryns. “Now there’s someone whose life probably took a very different track. Is there even a Markarth here?”
“There is, but it’s not for everyone.” A few more buttons and the four of them were on their way up. “Kind of a strange place, honestly. Founded by Reachmen trying to prove themselves to Hircine by going toe-to-toe with the dwarves on purpose.”
The Nerevarine sighed. “I wish that didn’t make as much sense as it does. Of course Hircine would enjoy something like that.”
“What, are you a werewolf, too?” asked the other Nerevarine. “I would have thought House Redoran would look down on that.”
“No, I got caught up in the Great Hunt on Solstheim after everything in Mournhold,” said the Nerevarine. “I would have thought you would have, too. You know, the Bloodmoon Prophecy?”
“Never heard of it. Honestly, I never had any reason to go to Solstheim before the Red Year. Everyone kept saying it was such a terrible place.”
The other shook his head. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Traded it for some common sense,” replied Teldryn. “Occasionally it comes back, like some kind of a rash. Nuisance, really.”
Before the other could respond, the lift had reached the surface, and a Shout threw him off his feet. The one-eyed Teldryn’s hand flew to his hilt—
“SHIT FUCK I’M SORRY” came the response. He hesitated, hand still on his hilt, and turned to the still-closed gate.
Past the gate, knee deep in the snow, stood a stocky Argonian woman in iron armor and a horned helmet. A much taller Nord woman stood behind her, carrying an enormous pack on her back.
“Swear on the sap, I thought you were going to be goddamn dwarves,” said the Argonian. To say her voice was gravelly would be an understatement: she sounded like she’d been smoking a pipe since the Dawn of the Mundus.
“Not an unreasonable guess to make,” said another Teldryn, as he helped the Nerevarine get back up to his feet. “We weren’t expecting anyone to be trying to enter Blackreach from the lift, either.”
“That’s the point,” replied the Argonian. “Last thing I want to do is head through where the dwarves are expecting guests. Figured I could grab the lever with a bit of magic.”
Teldryn took his hand off his hilt, and pulled the lever. The gate creaked open with a long screech of ancient brass.
“Thanks,” said the Argonian, walking into the lift and kicking the snow off her boots. “Blackreach is no picnic but this’ll make it a lot easier.”
The Nord stood outside, staring wide-eyed as the Teldryns walked past her through the snow, like she’d never seen four swordsmen in chitin armor before.
“Come on, Lydia,” said the woman. “We ain’t got time to dawdle.”
“Yes, my thane,” she said, and hurried into the lift.
Teldryn paused to watch the gate shut and the lift recede. Then he turned back to the others, walking through the sunrise towards Dawnstar.