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The City of Inkseeds rose from the desert, shining and decadent. Somehow, it still stood. I crossed through the gate, and the beast knew exactly where to take me: the way worn by beggars and poets. The only place a man of my appetites can find satisfaction. I'm not proud, but then, nobody ever is…
Black Book: The Hidden Twilight
Finding the first volume is an accident. A mistake. Whether it’s fool’s fortune or the strings of fate being tugged at by a trickster god playing puppet master, it doesn’t change the outcome.
One moment Rosalynn is standing in the back room of a Telvanni mushroom, running her finger along the spine of a dusty tome. The next–
Her lungs seize, her knees nearly buckle, and the world around her is swallowed whole by a black book.
She doesn’t scream—not yet—but her breath shudders as it leaves her. The ground gives way from wickwheat tatami floors to something wet and rotten. The air stales, reeking with the faint odor of mold scraped from the underside of a tomb.
What is this place?
Shaped from a madman’s memory of a nightmare, the library of Apocrypha is both terrible and beautiful.
The air smells of sulfur and ozone, touched faintly by mildew—the musty decay of water left to stagnate. Jagged stacks of burned books rise like a ribcage into the gloom, twisted columns of crumbling stone and charcoaled paper. Passageways coil and spiral endlessly, piecemealed together by equal parts magic and machine, bound by some impossible dream logic that changes with every breath.
Power thrums across every surface. Dark and hungry and inherently corruptive, a death knell to any who seek to siphon it. And yet…
All knowledge exists here.
Secrets no living tongue remembers the shape of. Legends of ancient cities now chewed up and swallowed by time. Histories of Kings that were birthed and buried long before Rosalynn’s ancestors walked the planes. Against the backdrop of a glimmerless void, tucked under a murky sky, the shelf-lined passageways and spiral staircases are twisted and ever-changing.
The temptation to linger feels like a physical thing–a velvet noose laid gently around her throat like a necklace.
She takes one step, and then another.
She tells herself she’s not looking for answers.
All her life, Rosalynn has had nothing but questions. Fate has never deemed her worthy of any answers. Her battle against the desire to stay falls somewhere between slipping into a rose-scented bath… and being violently yanked forward by a hand around her throat.
This place is an obstacle, but it could also be a boon. A pain and a pleasure.
Unprepared, unarmed, and uneasy, Rosalynn continues to resist. She needs to leave. And the way she arrived appears to have been one-way, which means–
The way out must be forward.
Naturally, it isn’t that simple: Apocrypha is not designed for one to come and go as they please.
The shift in her is slow and cruel. Hours pass–maybe more–and the terrain fights against her every choice, defying reason and route alike. Just as soon as she thinks she has found her way, a hallway suddenly changes direction or a forward-facing path shifts into a dead end. Her fire spells fizzle against the shelves. Her frost slides uselessly down the walls. Nothing listens. Nothing obeys.
Eventually Rosalynn slumps to the ground. Her back hits cold stone. Her head drops between her knees.
No one will find her here. No one will look.
She’s alone.
And no one is coming.
“I expected more from you.”
Not alone?
The voice is blue flame, like silver striking stone, and Rosalynn’s eyes shoot up to find the speaker, her heart thudding like a drum. The sound is strange—too sharp to be imagined, too real to ignore. Except that she finds nothing out of place. No one is there.
No one visible, at least.
The eyes of Hermaeus Mora have stared unblinking since she arrived. They emerge from every crack and alcove, from the ink-drenched sky and the darkened water below. They are the source of every light and the shape of every shadow. Where she’s gone, a hundred thousand irises the color of nothingness tracked her.
But this voice—this presence—is different. Feels different.
Another watcher, maybe. One she hadn’t noticed until now.
The thought unnerves her.
She pretends it doesn’t also intrigue her.
“Who’s there?” Rosalynn rises to her feet too quickly, her balance tipping before her boots settle. Her face is hot, flush and sticky with the humiliation of being found so vulnerable. She hates that she was caught like this, fighting tears with her knees on the floor like a child.
She looks around, trying to focus on anything but the tremor in her hands.
“Who are you?”
“Just another lost soul seeking answers.”
I very much doubt that.
His voice—and there’s no question he’s a he—is bottomless. The weight of old intelligence, sharp like cut obsidian and steeped in self-importance. Deep. Rough. Good.
Too good.
Rosalynn steps in the direction of the sound, narrowing her eyes, her spellwork humming against the base of her fingers.
Detect Life reveals nothing.
“Show yourself.”
He laughs—low, scorching, maddening. It trickles down her spine like warm water. She pretends she doesn’t like the sound of him and focuses instead on the edge beneath it. The growl.
Half the nerves in her body scream that she is in danger. The other half she’s choosing to ignore.
“Are you here to hunt your opponent, little rabbit? Or do you merely seek knowledge of him? ”
Detect Dead, nothing. Clairvoyance, still nothing. The spells fizzle out with a quiet hiss.
No trail to follow. No footsteps to track. He’s there, she knows he’s there, but there’s no trace of him at all.
Her heart beats faster.
“I wasn’t aware I had an opponent.”
Her voice sounds steadier than she feels, and she hates how quickly her palms have started to sweat. Anxiety thrums unimpeded through her body, more and more adrenaline bubbling to the surface the longer the speaker goes unfound.
Rosalynn continues to make slow, deliberate steps toward where she thinks his voice is coming from, each one calculated and in her control.
Even if the rest of her isn’t.
“Care to introduce yourself?” she stalls.
Rosalynn recalls the waves that thundered and crashed against the rocks of the Iliac Bay when she was a child. Remembers the riverboat that she and Brynjolf took onto Lake Honrich two summers ago. She thinks of surface tension and capillary waves. Worth a try, I guess.
She conjures a pool of water around her feet, shallow as a rain puddle. Just a trickle at first. It spreads outward like a silver fan, slow and deliberate, threading its way across the floor toward the source of the voice. She watches it creep forward, dragging loose scraps of paper as it goes, silent as breath.
A thin stream glides outward like an outstretched hand–
“I am your destiny.”
–and ripples around an invisible pair of boots.
Rosalynn’s breath hitches.
Gotcha.
“You’re a dead man.”
The crack of electricity is its only tell before Rosalynn sends a bolt of lightning searing in his direction. It scatters across the surface of the water, bursting between them in a rush of bright snapping light. The ward she casts is second nature—pure instinct—and she can feel a cold bolt of ice slam into her defense and dissolve into heat.
She doesn’t wait for another.
She dives behind an alcove, out of the line of fire, breath ragged.
“You cannot hide from destiny, Dragonborn.” His laughter overpowers the sound of the dying sparks and follows her into the shadows. Low. Unhurried. Too amused for her liking.
Pretentious asshole.
Rosalynn grits her teeth against the flare of her annoyance. She leans out of cover just enough to Shout:
“YOR TOOR SHUL.”
Burn, inferno, sun. Breathe fire.
A rush of dry, crackling heat washes across her face as a stream of fire erupts from her tongue and bursts from her words. A lash of orange-white light snaps like a whip across the open air between them, the blaze so bright it blurs her view of the dark figure that has appeared in the center of the blast.
He doesn’t even try to dodge. Doesn’t flinch. Whether from arrogance or confidence, he just stands there. A predator in the reeds, waiting for his chance.
He doesn’t wait long.
“FEIM ZII GRON.”
His Voice breaks the air like thunder, raw and reverent. For a heartbeat, his form glows, robes snapping back as if caught in a windstorm. His body gleams like a sun-lit prism before fading into ghostlight.
The fire slips right through him.
Rosalynn’s eyes go wide. Her heart skips.
He can Shout?
Rosalynn shoves herself back behind cover in time for a burst of frost to slam into the shelves beside her, coating the alcove in rime. Crystals bloom across the wall, and ice crawls over the pool of water she conjured earlier, freezing it solid around the soles of her boots–pinning her in place.
“Cheap trick!” she yells, squatting low to jerk her knife out of her boot. She slams its hilt against the frozen floor until it cracks and gives way.
“Don’t you have a sense of humor, Dragonborn?” His voice dances around her.
It’s infuriating how much she likes the way he sounds when he says her title. Like a secret. Like a smile.
She scowls. This is not the time to flirt with danger—literal danger.
If he can Shout, then what else is he capable of?
She’s not prepared for this. Not for a real fight. Her weapons, her potions, her bloody grimoire—they’re all still back at Tel Mithryn. All she has is a utility knife, a handful of half-remembered spells, and whatever sheer dumb luck the Gods feel fit to grant her—usually the kind to end in bruises.
Didn’t she help Hermaes Mora, once? Where’s he at now that she needs a favor back?
“There’s no use hiding, Dragonborn. You belong to me now. You’re in my power–”
Oh good, he’s started monologuing.
Rosalynn rolls her eyes, throws herself out of cover in a fluid tumble, and hurls the knife.
It sails beautifully.
Straight at his chest.
And stops.
Midair.
The knife hangs suspended in the air as if time is frozen. Unmoving. It doesn’t fall. It doesn’t spin. It just–hangs there.
This better not be more Psijic Order bullshit.
The figure tilts his head.
“Perhaps I judged you too quickly.”
His voice is smoother now. Darker. Chocolate dragged across gravel, honey dripping from a dagger.
Rosalynn’s stomach flips. He sounds like a villain in one of those novels you hide under your bed—someone dangerous who knows exactly how dangerous he is.
“Who are you?” Rosalynn demands, keeping her ward ready at the tips of her fingers.
“You really don’t know?”
His curiosity sounds genuine. Which leaves Rosalynn genuinely confused.
He’s tall. Broad. Too broad to be a mage, she thinks absently. If she had to fight him without a stamina potion, he would easily tire her out and overpower her. The man’s a mammoth.
And even if she did have her kit, Rosalynn doesn’t want to fight. She just spent half a decade hunting the God-King of Dragons—she went to Sovengarde and back to do it—and what does she have to show for it? Nothing.
Can’t she go one year without some great world-threatening evil to face down?
Can’t she just go home?
Her eyes drag from the knife to the figure before her, and she hesitates, her eyes fastened to the mask covering his face... It’s the mask that tips her off.
Serpentine tendrils arch away from a metal face—jagged and sharp in every direction—an expression of eternal ire, of pride and rage and pain, cast in solid bronze. The rest of him is cloaked in deep greens, the colors of damp moss-strewn forest floors during twilight hours.
She’s seen that silhouette before.
She knows that mask.
Dragon Priest.
No.
No, worse.
Her stomach twists.
Miraak.
The First Dragonborn, Champion to the Prince of Secrets, and Thief of Souls. This is the man responsible for enslaving the people of Solstheim. This is the monster whose cultists left her to bleed to death in the Rift.
But if he wanted her dead, she wouldn’t be breathing. He had the advantage and he announced himself. He let her find him. And now he’s just… standing there.
Watching.
Waiting?
“You know who I am.”
She feels her grip on her magic tighten, ready, waiting, but she doesn’t cast. Not yet. “Hard to forget a man whose fan club tried to kill me.”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be.” The words are simple, until he finishes. “Perhaps next time.”
“If there’s going to be a next time…” she starts, hesitant, quieter than she was before, “Would you show me the way out?”
As if it was never thrown at all, the knife clatters to the ground half-way between them, the steel stinging against wrought-iron floors. Neither make any move to reach for it.
It feels, bizarrely, like a truce.
“What will you give me?” Miraak asks, considering.
She swallows hard. Her mind races. Options flicker through her head and vanish just as quickly.
“What would you accept?” she asks, voice low. Steady, she hopes. If this is a negotiation, then she can play that game.
They don't play for very long.
“Your name.”
Her brows lift. That’s all?
Rosalynn can’t remember the last time anyone asked for her name. Some people already know it—most don’t care to. She’s Arch-Mage, Thane, Dragonborn. A title. A vessel. Rarely a person.
Still, it seems too easy. A name is nothing.
“If you get me out of here alive, you can have it.”
Just like that, the tension shifts again. Their pendulum swings from danger to diplomacy. From enemies to… not-quite-allies. Miraak sweeps his arm outward as if to bow—after you—and the wall beside him parts. An opening, dark and wide, where there wasn’t one before. Wasn't there?
No. She’s sure of it.
It wasn’t there until he wanted it to be.
She quickly learns that Apocrypha bends for him. Where Rosalynn was turned in circles, Miraak walks with purpose. Shelves straighten, dead ends swing open into throughways, bridges extend across looming abysses like obedient limbs. He shapes chaos into order as if he were this realm’s true master.
She struggles to keep up, taking two steps for each of his, breath catching whenever the floor groans beneath her boots.
He’s larger than any Nord she’s ever seen. Too tall, too broad, too steady. Was he even a Nord? Is he Atmoran? After being here so many centuries, would he even know the difference?
Rosalynn studies him from the side of her eye but there’s nothing to glean from watching. His mask is a bronze snarl. He stares forward, a cowl covering his hair, his robes hiding every inch of skin. If he turned to look at her, she wouldn’t even see his eyes—only slits of black, polished and empty.
She wonders idly if he’s watching her back.
And what he sees.
The first creature they find doesn't stop them.
It watches, impassive. Something between a man, an octopus, and a dragon, its unblinking eyes are huge and wet, the color of amber. Its predator face is framed by long sweeping tentacles. From its core is a second jaw the length of Rosalynn’s forearm, unhinged and lined with rows and rows of jagged yellow teeth. Grotesque and scaly, dripping with what she hopes is ink—but is almost definitely blood—Rosalynn has had kinder nightmares than this monstrosity that hovers before them.
The reek of sea rot fills her nose, acrid and cloying, and saturates the air between them like poison.
Rosalynn’s stomach flips.
What in the hells is that thing?
Miraak's calm voice answers her question as if she’d spoken it aloud. “The Seekers serve as librarians, both captive and captivated. They belong to Hermaeus Mora.”
The creature leans close enough for her to see her own reflection in its bright unsettling eyes, and impulse takes over. She steps away—toward Miraak.
She doesn’t mean to. Her boots just move.
His heat is immediate—real in a way nothing else in this realm has felt. Her shoulder brushes his. He hums softly.
“Frightened, Dragonborn?”
Less so when you’re speaking, which is probably a bad sign.
She doesn’t answer.
“You have no reason to be. The Seekers know better than to harm what is mine.”
That gets her attention.
His words hit like a physical thing.
She looks up at his mask sharply, but she has to force her eyes to stay narrowed, has to choke back the surprised gasp when she realizes just how closely she’d stepped toward him. She can see the dents and scratches in the metal of his mask, hear his quiet breathing behind it, feel the heat radiating from his body.
She wants to sound accusatory. She means to let him know that she isn’t some damsel-in-distress in need of a rescue. She needs to remind him that she walked through the land of the dead and lived—that she killed an unkillable dragon prophesied to swallow the world whole—that she is the most powerful being still alive on the face of Nirn.
She doesn’t say any of that.
Instead, she just sounds like a lost woman looking up at a man who found her.
“Yours?”
Miraak lifts a gloved hand to her cheek, traces down the line of her jaw with a touch that lingers just long enough to burn from the outside in.
“Mine.”
She doesn’t have time to process that—his words or his touch or the way his touch makes her feel—feel—that—because the creature chooses this inopportune moment to pry open the foul, tooth-lined jaw in its middle…
And it speaks.
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. Such shaping fantasies– ”
Rosalynn squeaks. Squeaks. She jumps back like she’s touched live flame.
“Okay, that’s not what I was expecting,” Rosalynn says, dumbfounded by the creature’s prose-wrung voice. It speaks in equal parts nonsense and poetry, and while it doesn’t quite sound beautiful, the tone of it is clear as crystal and steady as a surgeon’s practiced hand. Lilting. Intentioned. An actor mid-soliloquy.
“–that apprehend more than cool reason–”
“What did you expect?” Miraak asks curiously, titling his head toward hers, mask impassive.
She ignores the way his voice drags feather-light across her ear, and pretends she doesn't force back a shiver at the sound of it.
“Indecipherable screaming?” Rosaylnn suggests dryly, despite her heart thrumming double-time against her ribs. “Threats of violence?”
“–ever comprehends.”
Miraak huffs. A quiet, genuine sound. She gets the distinct impression that she’s amused him.
“Begone, Morian. We have little time before the master comes to call.”
Morian? That thing has a name?
The Seeker glides away without resistance, sliding toward the wall to clear the way for Miraak to lead them past. Rosalynn tightly crosses her arms around her chest as she follows behind, the rotten breath of the creature burning the hairs out of the inside of her nose, and she tries not to gag. It smells worse than the fish they gut on the docks in Windhelm—worse than the Hall of the Dead in Markarth.
As they pass, it begins to speak again—one last time:
“Though I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house, I would not unfold your tale and harrow up thy soul, fair daughter. This blessed day in Apocrypha shall ever be kept festival. ”
Rosalynn shivers as the words curl against the back of her neck like cold fingers.
She doesn’t look back.
Miraak slows long enough for her to come up beside him, then hand presses to the small of her waist, his heat leaching through the laces of her tunic as he gently urges her forward. He isn’t commanding, only firm. Grounding.
“Morian can keep a secret. And he won’t harm you,” Miraak says, easing her doubts for a second time. “When the time comes, you will die by my hand or not at all.”
Rosalynn has never been threatened quite so… gently .
The words should chill her, but they don’t. They settle under her skin, too warm to be a threat.
“You don’t act like someone who wants me dead,” Rosalynn points out.
No answer.
But his hand stays against her back.
He called me his, she thinks. His what? His opponent, his nemesis, his… lover?
Rosalynn has been all of those things before, but—as reluctant as she would be to admit it aloud—she has the least experience with lovers.
There were a few nights in Markarth with Sam Guvenne (who turned out not to be Sam Guvenne at all), a few months with Marcurio before he moved on to Cyrodiil with greater ambitions than love, and a few years off-and-on with Brynjolf until he finally cut it off for good. Nothing says love quite like being left behind all three times she tried to do it. Nothing says love quite like loneliness.
Not the time, she reminds herself. Not the time.
The drip and slosh of water echoes faintly, and their boots rap softly against metallic floors. His hand stays at her back, steady as a compass. Their sides bump against each other as they walk.
He doesn't move away.
Rosalynn forces herself to think of something—anything—else. Tries to catalogue their surroundings instead.
Apocrypha falls somewhere between a drowned temple and a burned-down library. A grotto swallowed by ink and memory. As Miraak leads, she begins mapping the place in her head—arches, walkways, twisted stairs. She tries to imagine it as a puzzle to be solved. A map yet to be cartographed.
But the architecture resists logic. The rules seem to change out from beneath her—the same rules seem to change in favor of her guide.
If I’d known I was coming to a Daedric Realm, I’d have asked Neloth to place another memory charm.
Speaking of which…
Why did Neloth have that blasted black book anyway? No warning. No runes. What if Talvas had been the one to stumble upon it instead of her? Or even Drovas? Oh, she is going to have words for that Telvanni, if she ever gets her hands on him.
If she ever makes it back.
“How far do we have to go?” Rosalynn hedges.
“Farther.”
“Right,” she sighs. “Naturally.”
“We could rest, if you’re feeling tired,” he offers. He doesn’t slow down, but she can feel his eyes on her. “Or is it my company you’re tired of?”
The smirk is there, even if she can’t see it.
Rosalynn scoffs. “Is that supposed to be a joke, Lord I Am Your Destiny ?”
He laughs—really laughs—the fullest sound she’s pulled from Miraak since their meeting, his perfect tenor ringing in her ears like a bell.
“It is the truth. Fate chose me to be the First Dragonborn, just as Fate determined you will be the Last.”
Rosalynn’s steps falter. Not much—just enough.
Last.
Last born?
Last standing?
“Why am I last?” she asks, quieter now.
Miraak says nothing.
When he doesn’t answer her, Rosalynn feels a pit begin to form in her stomach, a sinkhole inside her that threatens to drag the rest of her down with it. A slow-creeping anxiety begins to bloom in her chest, wrapping around her like kelp tangling around a pair of unsuspecting ankles near the shores of a dark lake.
Last means the final, the penultimate, the end. Last means forgotten. Abandoned. Alone.
Her throat tightens.
The universe spins around her, a whirlpool of water trying to dizzy her into drowning, and staying afloat takes every ounce of focus she has.
Rosalynn jerks away from Miraak’s guiding hand and moves to block his path. “Tell me what that means. Why am I the last?”
Miraak stops. Towers over her, mask unreadable.
Even with all expression and thought from her, Rosalynn has a creeping suspicion that his face would be no more expressive than the plate of metal he uses to hide it. He’s too careful for that, his movements too measured, his words too certain. She knows the sort of person who needs to be in control at all times. Hells, she is that person, most of the time.
“You have no idea of the true power a Dragonborn can wield,” Miraak says, but Rosalynn is tired of riddles.
She narrows her eyes.
Arrogant son of a bit–
“Then show me.”
Miraak steps forward, looming over her, her eyes level with the line of his shoulders. He’s close enough to cast a shadow over her entire body.
She doesn’t back down.
“This realm is beyond you. You have no power here. Soon, Solstheim will also be mine. I already control the minds of its people, and once they finish building my temple, I will absorb your soul and finally have the power to return home.”
Rosalynn glares up at him, her panic having blossomed to full-fledged annoyancee, her jaw already sore from holding back the lash of her words.
“If you think I’m just going to roll over and die, then you’re an idiot and an asshole. I’ve killed mudcrabs stronger than you, First Dragonborn.” She grins, sharp and dangerous. “If I make you bleed, I’ll make it look easy.”
Miraak moves fast.
For one heartbeat, she thinks he’s going to strike her. She tenses, reaching for her magicka—
But he doesn’t hit.
A gloved hand brushes her cheek. His touch trails into her dark hair.
Surprise and confusion marry together in her bloodstream, paving the way for something more akin to a tenderness she doesn’t know what to do with. Her magic fizzles out. Her hands drop—one lands against his chest, fingers curled into the folds of his robe.
She doesn’t understand any of this. Not him, not this feeling.
And yet—somewhere deep inside—she does .
“Our destiny warned me of your prowess.” His voice is a thread pulled tight, his words curling in her gut. He has a lock of her hair wrapped around his gloved finger. “It made no mention of your beauty.”
Rosalynn has been called beautiful, though not often. And rarely honestly. Men in Skyrim treat compliments as currency, angling to gain something in return for making an ugly duckling feel like a swan. A discounted price, a night of passion, a small favor. After a while, she stopped believing them.
Somehow, she believes him.
Even without seeing his face, without knowing a single detail about his looks—not the color of his hair, the shape of his eyes, the line of his mouth—she can’t help but feel the same way. There’s a pull between them, a magnetism that’s been there from the moment they met that’s pushing them together.
A string of fate pulled taut between them.
“Do you feel it too?” Rosalynn whispers.
For a long moment, only their shallow breathing answers. She almost feels silly for asking, almost takes it back, but then—
“Yes.”
Miraak moves first.
With barely time for Rosalynn to gasp, Miraak crowds her against the wall. Her boots scrape the floor, barely avoiding tripping, breath catching as she arches to keep balanced. Her other hand flies up, gripping fabric, clutching against him for purchase, nails digging into muscle.
He presses closer.
Her back bends against the grooves of the wall behind her as he presses his body against hers. When she sighs, he rasps a sound that can only be described as relief.
“I should kill you,” he whispers.
The words should slice like a blade.
They don’t.
His words sink deeper, lower—a confession made from a desperation she can relate to.
He doesn’t strike. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. Instead, Miraak tips his head downward, leaning at an odd angle to press their foreheads together. The cold metal soothes the flushed skin of her brow.
Rosalynn huffs a breathless laugh, sliding her fingers together at the back of his neck. “Is this what you’d consider dirty talk?”
“Is that what you want?” His voice is leaded, low with want—the same aching desire she has to unthread his robes and drag her hands down his body—the overripe fruit of both their forbidden thoughts looming tender and dark between them.
Yes .
“You want me to whisper in your ear all the obscene things I’d like to do to you?”
She almost chokes when he says it. Almost looses her balance again.
Yes, yes, yes of course she wants that.
“Please,” she breathes.
Her answer hangs between them for a heartbeat. Then she feels it—the weathered brush of his gloved knuckle, slow and deliberate, tracing the edge of her mouth. His finger slides along her lower lip, tugging lightly at the seam.
Rosalynn doesn't think. Doesn’t breathe. She parts her lips.
She let’s him.
Miraak groans softly, a sound like dark honey—a piece of dark chocolate being broken off just for her—as she runs her tongue along the seam of his finger. She tastes the leather, soft and supple, and drags her teeth across the surface when he doesn't immediately pull away. She feels his eyes fastened on her without needing to see them. She hears the way his breath leaves his throat.
She watches with fascination as the fabric at his neck shifts when he swallows hard.
“What I want to do to you,” he whispers, “We don’t have the time for.”
Disappointment doesn’t begin to describe the feeling—a ewer of cold water being splashed over the flush of her lustful heart—but she doesn’t back down, fingers digging into the back of his neck, holding him more firmly in place.
“Are you sure you’re going to kill me?” she murmurs.
Playfully. A dare.
His hand shifts in a blur.
He pinches her chin—firm enough to spring, sharp enough to bite back—then smooths his thumb over the hurt, gentling the touch, coaxing softness from the pain. He tilts her face up to his, close enough that she can feel the weight of his gaze through the mask.
It’s clear the only lust he planned for between them is bloodlust. He didn’t expect to grapple with wanting her any other way but dead. Didn’t plan for the wanting. Didn’t plan for her.
What’s unclear is what he’s decided to do about the development.
She pictures the petals of a mountain flower plucked off the bloom. Kills me, kills me not, kills me…
“Not tonight,” he says.
Kills me not.
“You’re giving me a lot of mixed signals,” Rosalynn breathes, half-laughing, half-relieved.
She presses herself closer against him, savoring the feel of his body—solid and sculpted, chiseled like marble beneath the fabric. Against her stomach, she feels undeniable proof of his want.
Whatever else he might feel about her, he can’t deny he wants.
“Forgive me,” he says, a man in the agony of desiring what he should not be allowed to have—pressed to the edge of restraint. “It has been so long since I have seen one such as you.”
Her breath hitches.
She tips her face and shivers when he drags his palm down the column of her neck, lightly settling his thumb in the hollow of her throat.
“A woman?” whispers.
“An equal.”
Rosalynn could recognize loneliness if she were blind and deaf with her arms behind her back. It is a permanent feeling, a state of being, an incurable wound. She feels its hold on Miraak the same way its clammy, knotted fingers have their hold on her.
Rosalynn has been alone for thirty-three years.
How long has he?
He doesn’t give her the chance to ask.
“We’re nearly at the end, Dragonborn. It’s time for you to return to Solstheim.”
“I’m not ready to go yet,” she protests softly, half-pouting, reaching her hand behind his head and hooking her finger in one of the leather straps that keep his mask fastened to his face and tugging softly. “Take this off first.”
“No.”
The word is sharp, fierce—backed with molten iron—and she jerks her hand back to his shoulder as if burned by it.
But when she flinches, he soothes the moment away. His fingers tuck her hair behind her ear, slow and gentle. Apologetic.
“You won’t like what you see,” he tells her softly, attempting to soothe the sting of his rejection. “There isn’t time.”
To see? Or to argue?
“Make time,” she says, voice hitching.
“Are you always so obstinate?” he murmurs.
No.
(Yes.)
He doesn’t sound like he dislikes it.
“At least tell me why you want me dead,” she says, but almost as soon as she says it, she regrets it. She’s afraid he’ll retreat—shut her out, wall himself off, leave her holding the shape of him like a butterfly escaping from her cupped palms.
Hastily, she grips his collar tighter, sinking her fingers into the heavy fabric of his robes. As if she could keep him there. As if she has the strength to hold him in place.
He sighs—long, heavy—but he doesn’t pull away.
“I wish to be the master of my own fate.”
Don’t we all?
She opens her mouth to question him—maybe even ask what that has to do with her—but he cuts her off.
“There is a book on a pedestal at the end of this hall. Read it. It will return you to where you came from.”
A dismissal.
As if the conversation is over. As if he can just device they’re done.
“I still have questions!” she blurts.
She’s not begging. Not exactly.
But the ay his gaze settles on her makes her cheeks burn. She can feel him staring, feel the sharp edge of his attention even through the mask. She can’t tell if he’s annoyed, withholding, or simply… amused.
Maybe he likes hearing her voice roughen like this. Maybe he likes the sound of her begging.
“I only have one.”
One?
Confusion blooms into understanding.
My name, she remembers. He asked for my name.
For the flicker of a heartbeat, she’s tempted to bargain—to hold it back. To leverage their game against him, to up his ante and play another round for more of his hard-won answers…
But that doesn’t seem fair.
He earned it.
“It’s Rosalynn.”
She isn’t sure what she expects. For him to vanish now that his curiosity is sated—or linger behind, her name a key turning in some unseen lock between them?
She doesn’t have to wonder long.
His hands slide down her sides, fingers spread wide as he drags them down her ribs to her back, settling north of her hips and tightening—possessive. They settle there, firm and unyielding.
He pulls her in.
She goes.
Her arms loop around him instinctively, holding on as she sinks into him, pressing her face into the bend of his shoulder. She allows him to hold most of her eight and she melts against him, burrows against his chest, hips pressed together. She’s aware of the scent of old parchment, the dry bite of frankincense, the faint breath of smoke from a long-dead hearth. She’s panting as if they’d done far more than just stand there together.
“Rosalynn.”
Her name in his voice breaks something open inside her.
Her stomach bottoms out.
He sounds desperate, hungry, yearning. He makes her name feel like something holy, the kind of sacred that makes you crawl on broken glass for a glimmer of what it feels like to be in the presence of Gods.
“Miraak,” she says, tipping her face up toward his, only an inch between his mask and her lips. “Fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to put us on this path just for one of us to kill the other. If we look, we could find another way…”
She trails off.
His arms clamp tightly around her, crushing the breath from her lungs, each one of her ribs popping in protest.
“Dragons have no hearts,” he rasps, low and tight against her ear. “There is no other way.”
It should sound final.
It should be the hammer of a judge's gavel, the final nail driven into a coffin lid.
But it isn’t.
He feels this too.
The magnetism, the pull, the string connecting them is still alive, its own thriving ecosystem alight with their—
This doesn’t feel like a battlefield.
It doesn’t even feel like a standoff.
“We aren’t dragons,” Rosalynn says finally.
She rises on her toes, just enough to bring her face level with his. She peers into the dark slits of his mark, searching, hoping, aching to glimpse something—anything—of the man beneath. She swears, just for a second, she sees a flicker of color, a glint of light. And then—
She leans in and presses her lips to the cold metal of his mask.
Softly. Deliberately.
She lingers for long enough to hear the sharp intake of his breath, to feel the faint tremble of his grasp. Then she stays for longer, the silence between them sliced thin, until her toes ache from standing on them and she has to make a reluctant retreat.
“Next time,” she whispers, “Take the mask off.”
Leaving is much the same as arriving was.
The opening of a cover, the turning of a page. One blink, and she’s standing in the ash-choked air of Solstheim again.
Alone.
The wind bites through her tunic, sharp and dry. The distant rumble of the Red Mountain fills the sky with endless grey. She touches her fingertips to her lips, as if to catch the last trace of him left behind.
Beneath her palm, the charred black cover of the book beats like a drum, mythic and vast.
She wouldn’t dare call it a heartbeat.
Mythic things have no hearts. Neither do dragons.
But maybe he does.