Chapter Text
“Tell me about your dream again. The one about the war, where you fought the Nords.”
“You mean the one where Nerevar fought the Nords.”
“No. I mean you. The way you tell it, I know it was you.”
Two women sit by the seaside, arms wrapped around each other, in the shadow of a wrecked warship. The sun has just fallen, leaving behind a plum-coloured dusk against which only the first few stars have begun to blink into existence. The sand of their beach is coarse and basalt-black, speckled with broken fragments of golden land-coral and the shrapnel of a recent battle, but they’re cushioned by a thick wool blanket beneath them, and by the embrace they share.
“Hasn’t there been enough fighting?” complains the dreamer, a lanky Dunmeri woman with a square jaw and a shock of red hair tied low behind her neck. “Aren’t you tired of combat?”
The other woman shakes her head. She’s also a Dunmer, younger and more slight of frame, lying half atop the propped-up dreamer, so that when she gestures 'no' her nose bumps into a breast. “I’m an Ordinator,” she says gravely. “I shouldn’t ever tire of it.”
The dreamer pinches her cheek. “You don’t look like an Ordinator, to me. You look like my Iliah.”
She blushes. “Idrenie--”
Laughing, the dreamer falls onto her back, pulling Iliah atop her in a tight embrace. Far above Azura’s star glints like an eye down upon them, made silver by a passing curl of volcanic smoke.
As Iliah settles atop her, Idrenie begins to speak, slow and measured, as if she’s recited the same thing a thousand times before. “Ancestors, a dream comes to me. My dream is about Saint Nerevar. In my dream, Saint Nerevar is crusading to drive out--”
A soft thumbpad presses her lower lip. “Idrenie,” Iliah murmurs. “Tell it the way you dreamed it.”
“Heretic.”
“Please?”
“... In my dream I am on a battlefield.” Idrenie closes her eyes, tilting her head back, losing herself to the memory. “There’s an army at my right hand, a sea of automatons to my left. Before me is Ysmir at the head of a mighty army, and another chieftain far to the western flank.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Afraid? No, I feel alive . I’m triumphant! Those Chieftains are not so mighty. You know, I slew one with my own hand, cut his head off, an impossible feat but by Azura’s grace I did it. The others have deserted, for how scared they are of me, or so says Vivec. It feels… good. The thrill of victory, more potent than skooma. I’m like an addict. Shaking, desperate to sink my axe into a Nord body for a taste of it.”
Idrenie opens her eyes, expecting momentarily that she can see the armies arrayed on Red Mountain before her. They aren’t there; there’s only the dark sky now filled with stars and the broken ribs of an overturned Akaviri runner close above them like a canopy, the whispering of the waves on gravel and Iliah’s breath tickling her neck.
“Vivec is with me,” Idrenie continues, closing her eyes again. “He’s carrying this device that Sotha Sil made. A listening-frame, he calls it. It will catch the Chieftains’ yelling and turn it back on them. My task is to get it close enough to Ysmir. So I order the automatons to go against the zombies, while I lead the heroic charge of my own.”
“Zombies?”
“Didn’t I ever mention the zombies? You wouldn’t believe the stink.”
“So what happened next?” Iliah’s propped herself up on her elbows, her body lying along Idrenie’s taut with excited energy.
Idrenie draws out a long, “Hmm.”
“Idri.”
“You didn’t ask me if Almalexia was there.”
“I know she wasn’t there. She told me she wasn’t at that battle.”
“And how would your goddess know what does or doesn’t happen in my dreams?”
They settle into a contemplative silence, for a moment, before the question becomes too heavy to bear. With a little ‘huph!’ Idrenie rolls them onto their sides; Iliah, with her Ordinator instincts, flings a leg around Idrenie’s hip and completes the roll for them, pinning Idrenie to herself with a strength that even Idrenie doesn’t expect, and now Idrenie is lying atop her.
Idrenie props herself up on her elbows and squints through the darkness. No longer can she see the stars and the battle of ages past; there’s only Iliah, her face half in shadow, her short dark hair fanned out amongst fragments of coral and dark sand, her expression sombre. She runs a hand along Iliah’s cheek and Iliah closes her eyes with a sigh.
“You never tell me about your dreams,” says Idrenie.
This makes Iliah frown. “Why would I?”
“I want to hear about your past lives too.”
“That’s not what it is.”
“Isn’t it? Why don’t you ask my wife?”
Iliah sits up, pushing Idrenie off of her. For a moment Idrenie worries that she’s offended her; the moment passes, Iliah’s staring out at the ocean with a thoughtful frown, and when Idrenie sidles over to embrace her she doesn’t pull away.
“I do dream of past lives,” Iliah admits in a soft voice. “Also of the present, but mostly of the past.”
Idrenie places her chin on Iliah’s shoulder and listens.
“Past lives is a good word for it,” Iliah murmurs to herself. “I feel like someone else lived those things. Even things that happened yesterday… It’s someone else’s deeds that I’m reading about in a book.”
“When do you not feel like someone else?”
“When I’m with you.”
Idrenie grabs her chin, turns her head, and kisses her, long and slow. For a while that’s the extent of them, two girls entwined on a shrapnel-strewed beach. Waves crash, the voices of a passing patrol waft in from a distance, but their world is silent and cosy when they separate again.
“So tell me, then,” Idrenie bids her in a whisper. “Tell me about your past lives.”
Iliah obeys.