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Dense fog rolls off the White River in slow, almost viscous waves, trying to swallow the whole of Windhelm in its misty jaws. Late nights in even later Summer months raise the temperatures of Eastmarch just enough to heat the freezing ice and turn it into rushing floes, tepid waters meeting the still cold air and transforming it into the suffocating blanket which now permeates the air.
Tendrils of creeping cloud seep their way through the streets, the homes, the walls—It is everywhere and everything all at once. Nothing is sacred nor safe from its suffocating touch as it blankets the whole of the city, filling every space, every crack, and every crevice in its slow march.
A blackout in white. Grey upon grey. It smothers light and sound, leaving nothing but the scent of earth and dew in its wake.
Unbothered by the current weather or the chill of night, Ulfric stands in the middle of it at the top most part of the parapets of the Palace of the Kings.
This is where Dahlia finds him after waking to him gone from their bed at half-past the witching hour. Especially as of late, it has not been uncommon for her to awaken in the middle of the night to the cool feel of empty sheets next to her, and then for her to inevitably go on a midnight stroll, haunting the many hallways of Palace in order to find him. More often than not she discovers him in his office or perched on his throne and looking out into the void—of what only the Divines know—but this time she has to hunt for him just a little harder than usual.
At first, she does not see him as the fog covers everything around her, but as she searches there is the faintest space where a thin stream of cold, silvery light stubbornly filters its way down to Nirn. There, Ulfric stands in a tenuous beacon of light in the even more blinding landscape of blanched alabaster, his eyes fixed and focused on the shrouded city below.
Despite the sparse moonlight casting a crown of pale around him, his face remains stoic and dark—a penumbra against the glow trying to permeate its way into him.
He is the dimmest of starlight surrounded by infinite shades of luminance, but he is hers. She walks towards him with muffled steps until she stands beside him, joining Ulfric in his ill-advised late-night ruminations.
“What are you looking at?” Dahlia asks him as she leans over the wall with him and looks down; she sees nothing but a sea of grey.
Turning his head, Ulfric looks to her, gaze falling over her from head to toe, and his lips upturn in the barest ghost of a smile.
What does he see? Bleak uncertainty. An unknown future. The all-consuming haze of his own failures. But he cannot tell her that.
Instead of answering with any number of those dismal truths, he finds another which will pacify her. He doesn’t need her to worry any more than she already does. “A starlit night with the brightest of them now by my side.” He replies simply as he looks down at her.
It’s a lie, and she knows it. They both know it. There is nothing out here but cold and mist-blanched stone, but she allows him to tell her so anyway if only to give him a moment of peace.
She smiles at him, the warmth of it reaching all the way to her eyes. “Then, if you see a starlit night, what I see is the shine of Magnus.” She moves a hand to cup his face as she reaches up on her tip-toes to kiss his stubbly cheek.
Even if his grey melancholy is the dullest light to most others, he is just as blinding to her as if he were plain midday.