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The first taste was bitter, much like all the other skooma he'd ever drunk. This was fine, he knew the kick would come in soon, and he could forget everything.
The second was when the lights appeared, hazy and floating in his field of vision. He was almost there, almost to the point where the hallucinations would kick in.
The third was when he finished the small bottle, and there was red in the corners of his vision. The shapes were there, but much stronger, more powerful. They surrounded him, watching him, formless and angry. This skooma was much stronger than even the Dunmer stashes he'd acquired. He passed out.
When he woke up, he was lying on the ground of a cage. Again. He looked up as another vampire gleefully declared what would happen, which involved his brutal death and their operations. He killed the vampire with his bare hands. He promptly began looking for more of that brew.
And he found it. Thirty small bottles in a crate. He drank three, fighting the dizziness as he pocketed as many as he could carry, and stumbled out of the depths, fighting vampires with wild, uneven spells, heading back towards the entrance. He was wounded from the frost magic they used, his exposed skin blistering and raw, and bleeding from a dagger one had hit him in the leg with, reopening the old wound he'd gotten from Karstaag. It seemed like years ago that he'd faced down the frost giant, maybe centuries. It was so long ago, so distant from where he was now.
He found a relatively sheltered area almost a mile away along the road, a mossy hole in the mountain. He dropped to the ground, crawling into the shadows of the cliff, curling up with his 'treasures'.
And that was where he was found by a pair of hunters, bleeding profusely from scratched-open wounds, with ten empty skooma bottles, screaming about Solstheim, Daedra and a Dunmer he'd lost. They'd taken him to Ivarstead, and left him there, shivering in the dark, with the instructions to find Wilhelm in the inn.
He didn't. He stood there all night, trying to remember how he'd gotten there, and trying to forget how he'd ended up in the skooma den.