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Chapter Text

Chapter 1 – The Doorstep and the Dagger

Personal Journal of Nuada Hlaalu
First Entry – 3rd of First Seed, 3E 427
Location: Census and Excise Office, Seyda Neen, Morrowind
“To know a land, one must first walk its shadows.”

The cot is rough, the candle guttering, the walls sweating brine. A skein of marsh-scent threads the shutters—salt, peat, crushed marsh-grass, wet chitin. Outside, the lighthouse turns its single eye like a bored magistrate, and the pier ropes complain in the old language of fiber and tide. Bureaucrats scrape quill against parchment beyond the door like beetles in a jar—scratch, blot, stamp, sigh. They think this is my beginning. It isn’t. This is where the wheel touches ground again. I was born to Balmora’s dust, not to any lineage that would claim me, and the stink of the salt marsh smells like a story I already know.

The Bastard of Balmora

They say I was found at dawn, a bundle on the Hlaalu Council House step, swaddled in a blanket stitched with the House crest. No note. No name. Just a question wrapped in cloth. The watchman who lifted me claimed a nearby door slammed shut as he did, but in Balmora every door breathes and most of them lie.

The city raised me as cities do—indifferently, and with lessons at every corner. Hawkers taught me prices by eyebrow widths; dice-men taught me odds by how their fingers hovered before the throw; drunkards taught me which doorways to avoid and which would open to a kind lie. The blanket became my first possession and a rumor that walked ahead of me: bastard of some councilor, street-rat with a noble’s scrap, problem someone paid to forget.

I learned to make the whispers useful. A merchant gives a longer look to a child with a crest-patch; a guard hesitates at the edge of scandal. Tricks came easy. I learned where a plank won’t creak, how to breathe through the nose when you run, how to steal with your eyes before your hands ever move. Along the Odai’s wet stairs I practiced on shutters that had creaked with every wind, and went home by rooftops because the ground remembers my footsteps.

South Wall taught me chalk. A feather under a sill: sky clear. A tilted square beside a lintel: no steel drawn inside. Three short verticals near a counting-room: watch turns on the hour. We called a fence a ferryman and a bribe a sleep and a mistake a funeral. I learned to read a room without turning my head: the scuff where a chair is dragged by habit, the shiny place on a latch where a nervous thumb lives, the bowl whose dust says it hasn’t been moved since harvest.

There were firsts. The first lifted purse—a cord cut, weight gone, my heart hammering loud enough to tell on me. The first near-miss—lantern light walking the wall while I clung to a windowsill by my fingers and prayer, learning that prayer is best whispered to patience. The first dead drop—third stair up from the landing with the knot to the left, plank pried and replaced so clean the house itself would swear nothing had happened.

The local thieves gave me my second name before I had use for the first. Some nights they’d leave a heel of bread and a strip of scrib jerky on a beam, and I learned that charity is just another way a guild tests potential. They started calling Scales, on account of the crest I wore like a shield. In time I could make my own rounds: gather chalk marks before the rain took them, oil a hinge that squealed at the wrong hour, rub out a feather if the sky was no longer clear. A city writes itself where stone meets habit; I learned to read.

Sometimes—on nights when Balmora held its breath and even the Odai river seemed to listen—I felt something else take interest. A small coolness at my shoulder when a stubborn latch decided to cooperate. A pause in the wind before I chose the left-hand route instead of the right. Once, on a roof with three ways down and only one I had any business surviving, a star sat alone in the wrong place until I noticed the shadow it made and the path it pointed at. Later I learned the names Nocturnal and Azura. Back then, they were only the feeling that I was not entirely alone.

By then the blanket had faded to tatters and stitched into the lining of my cloak—a rumor made into armor. I kept it not for sentiment, but for weight. Some doors open to coins. Others to blood. And some just for the story, for the potential that I held. 

The Drunk in the Shadows

I met Caius Cosades when I thought myself perfect. He was a shape slumped outside a shack by South Wall, shirtless, eyes red, reeking of skooma and yesterday’s sujamma. A purse hung unguarded and easy pickings. I came in light as fog. A kiss of leather, a breath, a touch—

—and the knife was at my throat, steady as a metronome.

“Good steps,” he said, voice amused, present, not drunk at all. “But you breathe like you’re still deciding.”

He didn’t rise. He made me step back from the blade instead—lesson one: the world won’t move for you. Then he stood in one fluid shrug of muscle and old scars and tucked the knife away.

Caius’s shack smelled of sweat, paper, resin, and the sharp ghost of moon-sugar. Maps blistered the walls—corners lifted, weighted with pins. A bow hung above the door, sinew string waxed to a dark shine; beneath it, a pack I later learned held everything he needed if he had to leave in a hurry.

He became what I had never had: a teacher who saw the use in me. He taught me to count a patrol by the sound of its boots. To feel nail heads beneath a rug before I trusted my weight to a plank. To draw a bow on the exhale and loose as the world holds still for half a heartbeat. He made me walk the same rotten plank in a ruined roof until I could lay my weight on the grain and never find the squeak again.

“Again,” was his favorite word. “Perfection is just boredom that learned discipline.”

He broke me of petty habits. “You step like a poem,” he said once, tapping my ankle with a stick. “Creative and with purpose. Now step like a rumor.” He blindfolded me and made me name rooms by their breath: fish smoke, lamp oil, damp straw, a man who hides fear with garlic. He put a pebble in my mouth and made me run the length of the river without swallowing it—control your throat, control your panic. He’d sit me in South Wall and say, “Back to the corner. Count exits. Count drunk men worth fearing and sober men not worth it. Now—count the liars.”

“Daggers are for answers,” he’d say, laying out steel on felt, “but questions will keep you alive.” He taught me the small kindnesses that buy big grace: oil a hinge you’re not using; leave a wedge in a latch for the next poor bastard; mark a warning where you found one. He made me write what I stole—how, why, which mistake almost found me—and made me read the words out loud until the shame sunk in.

He smelled of dust and secrets and the clean salt of a man who washes in cold water. When he laughed, it sounded like a man who had lived long enough to know what was worth having, and what wasnt. He never said he was with the “Blades.” He didn’t have to. Beneath the rags and ruin thats all he was—a blade. I learned to be one too.

The Road to the Capital

When my legs caught up to my hands and my hands caught up to my head, Caius said Balmora had taught me all it could. He put a folded pass in my palm and pointed west toward the Marble City that pretends the world is still worth saving.

The Imperial City is its own school. The first thing it teaches is scale. White-Gold Tower marks the sky like an accusation; Green Emperor Way glows with money that has learned to be polite. Masters there wear scholar’s ink and priest’s collars and diplomat’s smiles, but their work is no different from a back-alley lift. They taught me to read lips across a banquet table by watching reflections in a wine jug, to hear the lie that sounds most like truth, to listen to the space between two men’s words and know the debt that lives there.

A townhouse off the Avenue became a classroom with curtains drawn. “Show me the walk,” a woman with archivist’s fingers would say, and I’d mentally pace a room I’d only seen once, naming hinges, windows, sightlines, bulb of oil nearly empty, wax pooling on the left—left-handed scribe. “Good,” she’d murmur. “Now again.” A Redguard tutor taught brush-passes, and how to pick a noble’s pocket; a Colovian captain walked me through countersurveillance in the Market District—touch a stall, glance at nothing, double back only when the city sleeps.

I started to be seen, and my name was noted. Nowhere public, but in the places that mattered. I learned dead alphabets to speak to living men: the priest’s cipher, the courier’s shorthand, a fraying skein of Dwemer glyphs no one swears to know. They put a page of Ayleid scrawl in front of me and a candle, and I had til the wick touched the brass holder to decipher. I learned to write letters that look like a friend’s hand and feel authentic.

They called me initiate of the Blades before I reached the age of twenty. I called it learning where the Empire keeps its knives. Sometimes, alone on a city roof with the stone warm beneath me and stars spilling their cold, I felt that stillness I’d known as a child—Azura’s regard when a decision mattered, Nocturnal’s cloak when I stepped where I shouldn’t. I did not pray. But I learned to notice.

Return to Vvardenfell

The order came sealed and unsigned, the way the important ones do. Return to Morrowind. Learn the currents that aren’t charted. Infiltrate where it looks like I belong and where it looks like I don’t. Test the loyalties of Houses and guilds. See how deep the stories of Nerevar run in the ash.

They put me on a prison ship—useful theater. The hold smelled of bilge and old fear. Chains kissed wrists. Somewhere above, a gull laughed and I tried not to think it was at me.

“Wake up,” a voice said—a Dunmer’s cadence, Balmora in the accent. “We’re here. Why are you shaking? Seasick or soul-sick?”

He was all angles and humor: Jiub. Eyes quick, mouth quicker, the kind of prisoner with pockets full of stories and nothing else. He offered me a cup with both hands as if we were equals on a better ship. “First breath’s the worst,” he said. “Second breath is Morrowind.”

“I still remember it,” I said.

“Good,” Jiub grinned. “She remembers you.”

We swayed together as the ship nosed the shallows. He kept talking, the way nervous men talk to fill time. Cliff racers, he swore, were the devil’s kites; he planned to make them remember him before he left this world. “Someday,” he said, as if bargaining with fate, “they’ll sing about it.” I believed him a little, because some mouths are built for prophecies even when they’re half-jokes.

The hatch clanged. Boots on steps. Light spilled down the dark hold like a flood.

On deck, the light was a blade. The Sea of Ghosts breathed cold on our faces. Seyda Neen hunched ahead: marsh and shacks, the Imperial buildings trying and failing to bring civilization to swamps. A silt strider moaned somewhere inland and echoed across the marsh. Dockworkers muttered in Dunmeris, and a Census clerk held a sheaf of paper like a shield.

“Name,” a guard barked.

“Nuada,” I said. Jiub elbowed me lightly, as I had held back the part I wanted fewer people to know. “Hlaalu.”

“...Hlaalu,” The Guard murmured. “Some of us are born lucky. I'm sure the House paid off your sentence.”

We filed off, one by one, a theater show for the watching dock workers. At the gangplank’s foot, Jiub leaned close. “Keep your feet under you,” he said, low enough for just me. “Morrowind will drag you down if it can.” Then he laughed and went with the guard.

I was brought inside a different room. The Census and Excise Office was nothing but damp paper and habit. Quills scratched like reeds blowing in the wind. A older Imperial man coughed loudly. “By order of the Emperor,” he intoned, stamping a seal that smelled faintly of hot wax and old power. “You are to take this letter to Caius Cosades in Balmora. You are free of all charges.” The chains came off like punctuation and hit the ground with a clang.

Through the shutters I could smell salt marsh and lamp oil. Tomorrow I will walk out of Seyda Neen with papers that say one thing and a purpose that says another. The Empire has cast me back into my homeland’s shadow and told me to bring it into the light.

I still have the blanket with the Hlaalu crest, worn to a ribbon and hidden in my bag. I keep it not for sentiment, but for weight. Some doors open to coin. Others to blood. And some just for the story, for the potential that I held. 

— Nuada Hlaalu
Bastard of Balmora • Initiate of the Blades
Student of Caius Cosades • Outlander Returned

Chapter Text

Chapter 2 – Chalk and Silk

Second Entry – 2nd of Rain’s Hand, 3E 427
Lothiefion: Balmora, South Wall Cornerclub

“It is easier to wear a hundred masks than to trust in one face.”

A Thieve’s Cant

You’re going to see marks and hear phrases in these pages that don’t belong to books. That’s Thieves’ Cant —our way of making a city talk. It isn’t just slang. It’s a toolkit: chalk and glass-scratch, hand-signs, knock-rhythms, the way a cloth is folded, the weight you put on a floorboard, even when you choose not to speak. It lets a dozen strangers work like one mind and leave nothing behind.

Think of Cant as maps we draw on the world that rain can wash off. A feather drawn on a door, two tiny lines by a threshold, a spiral where only a thief would glance—each says more than a shouted warning, and says it only to the right eyes. We lay routes, warn of heat, mark ferrymen (that’s fences, in some towns), time a guard’s loop, even set house rules (“no steel drawn inside”) without writing a single treasonous word.

Every city has its own dialect. Balmora speaks chalk on brick and scratches. Vivec prefers glass-scratch where the light will catch it once and then forget. Ald’ruhn cuts its messages into carapace and cairns—bone-cant. Gnisis notches driftwood and door-frames. On Solstheim we burn signs into basalt fangs with a heated dagger because chalk doesn't stick in the cold. Court-cant—what the soft-handed use when they want thieves’ meanings without thieves’ stink—is the same trick with nicer verbs: “consideration” for a bribe, “quiet investor” for a fence, “market adjustment” for a sanctioned theft.

What it can do? It keeps crews alive. It lets me walk into a place alone and be met by help I’ve never met. It can stop a blood-feud at the door, turn an ambush into a missed appointment, or move a ledger three rooms without ever existing on paper. It is plausible deniability made manifest.

Here’s a handful you’ll meet often—enough to make sense of my shorthand:

• Feather — Safe, sky’s clear. A go-ahead. Placement just adds context: under a pier means a safe launch; tucked inside a service door means a corridor is quiet; point of the quill can aim your next step. If I write “wing clean,” it’s the same idea but be quick about it.
  
  
• Broken circle — storm about / change route. Means heat coming, truce fragile, or “do not use this door.” If I say “storm spent,” danger has passed.
  
  
• Tilted square (or a sideways V in some quarters) — no steel drawn inside. House rule. Break it and you’ll meet a different dialect: knives.
  
  
• Two short verticals — watch loop breaks here (or “turns on the hour,” depending on which way they lean).
  
  
• Shallow spiral — meet on the turn. “Moonrise” if I write it near the open air; “reminder for future self” if I tuck it ankle-high for my own boots.
  
  
• Tiny star — roof road clean. Sometimes “thief road only; don’t bring steel.”
  
  
• Chalk fishhook — ferryman drinks fair (that is: the fence won’t cheat you today). Under a counter, on a pier piling, back stair—context tells you which ferryman.
  
  
• Stacked chevrons — ferryman here; one more run left. Nested tight means: there’s a price besides coin—may need a job done.
  
  
• Three dots in a triangle — river calm; storm passed. I’ll leave it near a guard house when I’ve just handed them something to keep them busy for a while.
  
  
• Cross with a notch — teeth spent; take the thief path. My way of telling the next soul: the threat on this road is already dead, go around anyway. Can never be too careful.
  
  

Not all cant is mark and chalk. We use knocks—three, breath, two will always open certain doors for me—and tavern taps (three soft on the bar means lanterns are walking; keep your name short).

A last warning: cant is meant to be temporary. If you’re reading a feather that’s been there a week, be cautious. And if you see a sign that seems to invite you where you’ve never been—remember that I also write for myself. Some doors open only because they know whose hand is on them.

Read the marks, and you’ll hear the city as I do. Ignore them, and you’ll still hear it—just closer, and with teeth.

Salt Spray and Back Alleys

Morning rose in Sedya Neen and I can feel the two schools of thought war within my bones: the alley-cant I learned as a Balmora gutter-rat, and the polished court-cant the Blades use in Cyrodiil. The first is chalk on brick, thumb-signs in a dark doorway, the quiet of a lifted latch. The second is ledger slang, brush-passes at banquets, and jokes with two meanings told in ballroom crowds. I speak both now, but the dialects do not map cleanly; every city keeps its own wrists and vowels. Half this month has been translation—of words, of people, of myself.

In Balmora a single feather mark under a windowsill means sky clear ; in Vivec it can mean roof road free unless you mark the quill twice—then it warns of lantern patrols on the parapets. Ald’ruhn thieves notch their cairns for no steel drawn inside ; in Gnisis the same notch means no questions asked, and you’ll get stabbed for bringing a blade or a story. 

So I walk between. Morning with runners from the local thieves guild, chalking spirals and tilted squares where they’ll be rubbed out by noon; evening in silk sleeves translating a council hall’s “market realignment” into a request for a lock that opens politely. I’m the bridge when alley-cant needs to sound like a contract and court-cant needs to mean a job. If I keep this up long enough, perhaps the languages will stop being two schools and become one hand—five fingers, same palm—opening whatever door I point it at.

But all of that fluency belongs to roads I haven’t walked yet. First comes Seyda Neen—mud and salt, lantern hiss and ledger ink, a Census clerk who squints at my name and a cornerclub that tests strangers with silence. Before councils and contracts, before thieves and courtiers speak the same joke, I have to learn which board on the pier squeaks, which guard counts slow on the turn, and which faces listen more than they talk. Legends wait. Ledgers don’t. I’ll start in the backwater at the edge of Vvardenfell—one favor, one rumor, one mark in chalk—and earn the right to speak both tongues out loud.

Seyda Neen: Silt, Salt, and Secrets

The swamp is provincial but not stupid. In the Imperial City, lanterns means city watch; in Seyda Neen, the same word gets you a shrug unless you tip the cant with two fingers—lanterns here means Ordinators passing through . Different island, different fears.

I worked the docks the way Caius taught me in my youth: count boots, not faces; count silences, not words. I chalked a fishhook on the east piling— fence drinks fair —for any thief who can read the grain. Three short verticals on the sluice gate— patrol turns here on the hour . A dull gouge on the pawnbroker’s back shutter— door kisses coin; owner blinks slow (bribable).

The gutterfolk spoke corner-cant in halves:

• “How’s the river?” (Are the guards tight?)
  
  
• “Runs thick; stones sleep.” (Patrols are lazy tonight.)
  
  
• “Where’s the ferryman?” (Who buys?)
  
  
• “Under the reed mats.” (Ask the mat seller; pass-word needed.)
  
  

The Blades’ training slipped in where the conversations got deep: I set a dead drop (oiled packet in a rope splice), ran a brush-pass with a Census clerk who thinks he’s honest, and corrected a ledger “error” that will keep a slip clear for months. Alley-cant to open the door, court-cant to keep it wedged. Information flows where usefulness goes, and I made myself useful.

The Taxman’s Grave 

I didn’t go looking for a taxman; the town sent me to him.

The first whisper was court-cant—upstairs at Arrille’s Trading Post, where merchants pretend their ledgers don’t gossip. Arrille himself frowned at a page and told no one in particular, “Collections from the south marsh are two days late.” He didn’t look at me, which is how a careful man asks for help without paying for it. A drunk guard at the same table grumbled that the “tally-man with the pretty seal” hadn’t shown for his usual sujamma.

Second came alley-cant—dockhands passing a bottle along the pier and a ferryman tapping the rail twice (bad weather; worse luck). “Census boy didn’t take the skiff back,” one said. “He always brings it back.” That always told me more than the missing body did.

The third was grief with a lantern. I climbed the lighthouse stair on a hunch and found Thavere Vedrano watching the shoals instead of the sky, a shawl clutched like a promise. She tried to be brisk—“Have you seen Processus?”—and failed on the last syllable. I answered with a nod that meant I would look, not that I knew. She pressed his route into my hand, worry plain on her face. Towards the south marsh huts, then the gully path where the rain raises the bank. “He never misses the gully,” she said, and the way she said never drew the map truer than ink.

Seyda Neen doesn’t keep secrets; it leaves them in mud where only people who look down will find them. I started in the places that talk without moving their lips: the Census ledger (late collection on three shacks by the south marsh), the tavern tab (taxman liked sujamma on the second night of the week), and the dock book (his skiff signed out, not signed back). Court-cant first—harmless questions that get me set in the right direction.

Out back, kids were spearing mudcrabs with willow sticks. I paid them in sweetroll crumbs to play a different game: show me where the important man walks his route. They led me along a reed bed to a gully the color of old tea. Not far off the path, Processus Vitellius lay face-down in the muck. One set of bootprints in and out; left heel worn to the nail; big toe heavy—an old break pushing the leather thin. Foryn Gilnith’s walk. He’d been rehearsing his resentment in the cornerclub all day; the gully was just the last verse.

I left a cant ring—three dots in a triangle—scratched under the pier rail (storm passed; river calm) so any thief coming after me would know the road was clear, then followed the prints back up the cut into town. The path crossed a fence slat I’d chalked earlier with a tilted square (no steel inside); I rubbed it out. Steel seemed inevitable nowl.

Foryn opened his door with a bottle in one hand and a grievance in the other. When I confronted him, he came at me glass first.. I let him pass by—let the bottle kiss my sleeve and break harmless—then took the knife in his other hand and planted it in his gut. Self-defense is a dialect every city speaks; you just have to speak it cleanly. I kept my breathing where Caius taught me—on the exhale—and let Foryn’s momentum carry his lunge to the ground.

I left another mark—a feather under the window sill, point toward the street (sky clear; bring witnesses)—and walked the long way to the Guard tower so the right eyes could see the right steps. The Captain appreciated the quiet respect I used to bring this case to a close. No one else got hurt, and handing over a tidy sum helped smooth any wrinkles.

The taxman’s signet went back to the woman who loved him—no sermon, just a palm-to-palm return and a nod that knew how to leave. I made sure the Census ledger reflected a small forgiveness on the south-marsh arrears. The docks heard about both before sundown. By lantern-time the whisper was set: outlander serves the Empire by day, buys beggars soup by night. In a town like Seyda Neen, curiosity opens more doors than a crowbar; I had just bought myself a week of unlocked ones.

By dusk, the town had decided to tolerate me. That was enough. I packed light—chalk, wire, oil, a clean shirt to pass for respectability—and left a feather mark under the lighthouse hatch (wing north; road clear) for any thief who cared to read my trail. At first light I’d take the silt strider upriver, ride its creaking knees over the marsh and into the hills. Balmora waited there with old scars and new work: the South Wall’s lanterns, Nileno’s ledgers, and Caius Cosades hopefully welcoming me home. North, then—toward the Odai and the masks I was meant to wear.

The Nord on the Road

A Nord tried to ambush me with bravado and poor footwork just outside of Seyda Neen. I offered him a mercy any court would bless. He chose a saga instead and got an epitaph. The arrow rode the exhale the way Caius taught me; the body fed nix-hounds and the silence that came after.

But silence is only honest when you test it.

The “block” in the road was a novice’s trick—fallen limb dragged across the ash to look like stormfall. The scrape marks were wrong: straight-line pulls, no wind scallop, no scattered twigs. He’d built a shadow theater and stood in the wings with his sword half out. I followed his tracks back three turns and found a blind he’d used before: two stones nested for a knee rest, ash pressed smooth in a palm-width oval, a bottle throat-down so it wouldn’t flash. Not the first time, then.

His kit told two stories. The belt was good Nibenese leather, dyed cheap; the edge stitching was Imperial tight, not local. But the fletch on his spare arrows was Bitter Coast marsh-wren, cut by someone who sharpens with a shell, not a file. Purse held mixed coin: three Hlaalu-mint drakes, one East Empire scrip chit, and—oddly—a sawed half of a cheap brass token scored with a single diagonal. In alley-cant, a cut token like that can mean share taken / job paid . Whose job? Might be nothing. Might be a whisper with teeth.

In his coat lining I found a strip of vellum torn on the diagonal: brown cloak / Hlaalu pin / Balmora road— noon . Crude hand, no seal. Could be the description of any hundred merchants. Still—he looked at me twice before he shouted, like he was checking a sketch against a face. When he lunged, he said “Hlaalu whelp,” not “coin” or “pack.” Did he know me? Or did he know my blanket-crest before I did?

I walked the verge for a second set of steps. There were scuffs that weren’t his—lighter, narrower, ending at a low basalt shelf with a good view of the road. A watcher? Or a herder who didn’t linger? On the shelf’s underside someone had burned a quick mark with a pipe stem: a tiny open eye. Not thief-cant from South Wall. Not Redoran quarry-speech. Temple boys sometimes scratch omens; Camonna Tong sometimes borrow them. Either way, the eye was turned toward the road, not the pass.

I sanitized the scene—Cyrodiil habit. Brushed out the drag line with a branch, kicked ash over the biggest blood, rolled him under a tumble of thorn where the nix-hounds would argue him into the scrub by dusk. I took nothing but the half token and the vellum strip. On the milestone I scratched a road-cant mark—cross with a notch— teeth spent; thieftail path safer —so the next thief doesn’t need to waste an arrow on the same ghost. A little farther on, under a cairn-stone I left a feather scratched with one extra bar—our way of saying watchers above, not just ahead —for any Guild runner reading the mile.

Was it just a robbery gone wrong? Maybe. Plenty of loud Nords make their living picking the wrong pocket with a sword. Or it was eyes on the road, a cheap test to see if the boy left on Hlaalu’s steps still bleeds like a boy. The truth often wears both cloaks. Either way, the next milestone after that one got a tiny star tucked under its lip— roof road clean —and I took it, because ambushes prefer men who keep to ruts.

Between Cyrodiil and Balmora, you learn to live in the space between theories. You leave enough chalk for the next set of feet, and you keep moving.

Return to Balmora: A Home Revisited

Balmora wears time like a scar—familiar line, deeper cut. The Odai still talks to the stones, but the Hlaalu banners have put on weight. I took two rooms above the South Wall Cornerclub, where the Guild lives in plain sight and speaks as much with bottle bottoms as with tongues.

Old glass-scratch rules still breathe here: a shallow spiral near the cellar— gather tonight; bring fresh rope ; a sideways V over the door— no steel drawn inside ; three soft taps from the barkeep when lanterns walk by— keep your name short . I pried up the third floorboard from the stair (knot to the left) for the house dead drop, and cut a thieve’s road across the roof: left knee, drainpipe, chimneystack, black tile that doesn’t squeak.

But ten years is a long time for a dialect. Kids here call a fence a ferryman now; what we marked as salt (bribe) the new thieves call sleep. A three-dot corner scratch that once meant run light now means runner owed . I learned quick, or pretended the best I could.

By daylight I walked the respectable circuits, the ones that pretend the underroads don’t exist. The Mages Guild steward weighed me with a schoolmaster’s gaze that did not blink. “We enforce the charter,” she said, voice dry as bone parchment. “We reward initiative.” Shelves hummed with trapped cantrips, and an apprentice with ink on her sleeves whispered about Dwemer ruins the way a boy whispers about knives. I left my name on their rolls and a favor on their counter—two ampoules of fresh trama-resin for their “initiatives.”

The Fighters Guild smelled of oil and old victories. The steward’s smile was all sharp teeth and edge: “Contract work. Clean or quiet, depending on who asks.” Sparring dummies wore more stitches than the men. I traced the gouges in the floor with my heel and pictured where a hammer would fall hardest. We shook hands like merchants who planned to betray each other profitably.

South market, a Council Club looked past me like I was a stain. Slate-eyed doormen with the right scars and the wrong patience. The word Camonna rode the air without ever being said—Dunmer who drink their pride neat and serve it back colder. “Outlanders aren’t served,” the steward murmured, which only told me who was . I left a small spiral under their back stair— storm likely —for any thief reading my shadows.

At dusk, a ferryman I trusted from the Odai run slid a folded scrap into my palm the way priests pass blessings. VvV scratched along the fold—Vivec—and the alley-cant below it read: red ink, legal knives, Arena waistworks . The Morag Tong, then—assassins with licenses and philosophy, which is a more dangerous mix than skooma and a good reason. If Balmora had Tong above ground, Vivec kept the Tong that wrote in ledgers below it. Noted. Filed. A door for later.

Night pulled the city tight. I checked the South Wall roof road twice, then once more, because caution is cheaper than grief. Old routes were still good: down across the clothiers’ beams, jump the narrow, two hands on the clay lip, and then the quiet drop into the alley with the cracked urn. I threaded the narrow where the lantern goes blind and turned toward the corner of town that never learned to sleep.

Whatever face I’m wearing—merchant’s smile, guildhand’s nod, councilor’s calm—there’s one door I use plain. Caius’s. Father by choice, mentor by necessity, the man who turned a thief’s hands into a spy’s. I felt the old itch between my shoulders—the one that means something is about to change, again . I needed to see how steady his shadow fell on the wall tonight, and whether the old house still breathed the way it did when I was twelve and thought I’d invented silence.

I cut across the last roof, took the drain to the street, and let the city’s noise carry my steps. Time to check on the man who taught me how to survive.

Caius Cosades: A Blade’s Edge in the Dirt

Caius still keeps his brilliance under rags and a skooma stink, which is one more disguise than most men can carry. His door was the same swollen plank with the blistered latch; I let myself in on the pause between two street shouts the way he taught me. He was half-shirted, quill behind one ear, a bottle sweating on the sill. When he saw me, his “Boy” landed like a hand on the shoulder you didn’t know you wanted. A reunion of steel and memory.

He didn’t hug; Caius measures men by the noise their boots make. He circled me once, tugged the strap of my quiver down a finger’s width, and tapped my elbow so the draw wouldn’t flash in a window. “Tell me the room,” he said without looking at it. I gave him back the inventory he trained into me: one loose floorboard left of the bedfoot; rot in the south shutter; two letters half-burned in the brazier, one Temple seal, one East Empire Company; a skooma pipe he never smokes when anyone important is watching. He grunted, which is how he says good.

“Two tongues,” he reminded me, setting a chipped mug on a map that was more names than places. “Balmora’s chalk, Cyrodiil’s silk. You'll find the need for both here. Walk the shadows of your own land. Burrow into the guilds. Count their debts, not their daggers. And listen for two names that don’t stay dead.” He drew two rough circles with the wet mug touching in the center: Sixth House in one, Nerevarine in the other. “Find the overlap,” He said, “And we’ll have our answers.”

We fell into old drills without deciding to. He made me cross the room twice—once with weight on the outside of the boards, once breathing only on the exhale. He palmed a coin; I picked which hand by the shoulder he forgot he was tensing. He rapped the doorframe—two quick, one slow—the old code for lanterns near, keep your talk small, and I answered with a feather scratched under the door, sky clear if you keep low. He smiled around the edges. “Still a thief,” he said.

“Some things you just cant forget.” I said back.

Caius was skooma and sujamma and sweat and something you only learn in wars fought in alleys. “The Empire is spooked by something old,” he said, voice like a boot on gravel. “It wants eyes in the dark that the dark doesn’t notice.” He didn’t have to say yours. He slid a thin blue booklet across the table—cipher I knew by the smell of the ink—and a black waxed notebook with sand still in the spine. “Blue for ink we’ll both admit exists. Black for chalk we’ll both pretend we never saw.” He tapped each, then my chest. “If one gets found, make sure it’s the right one.”

He gave me three rules he’d given me once before when I was all knees and bad ideas: “Exhale before you decide. Count shoes, not faces. Leave a door a finger open and see who closes it.” The second time you hear a rule is when it becomes a habit. 

“Temple whispers?” I asked, because he lets you ask one question you already know the answer to. He half-smiled. “If you ever need to get a priestess to remember courage, find Amaya in the Temple district.” He poured two fingers of something that smelled like varnish and memory and we drank to the parts of the job that don’t write themselves down.

“Dagoth. Nerevar. Ashlanders,” he said, counting off with a blunt thumbnail. “And always, the word dreams. If it comes for you—and it may—try to wake up.” He watched my face a breath too long. Then the orders, light as paper and heavy as stone: join the Fighters and Mages Guilds; make nice with Nileno Dorvayn in the Hlaalu Council Company; keep the Thieves Guild on our side, and be unnoticed as long as I could.

I am those eyes. I write one set of notes in ink for the Blades and another in chalk for the thiefs. Between the two, a path is forming—cant spoken softly, orders carried lightly, and doors that open because I remember which language they were built to hear. When I left, he did the same thing he did the night I tried to pick his purse as a boy: two taps to my chest, one to the doorframe. “Go on then,” he said, looking at the floor like it had said something clever. “And exhale first.”

Sugar-Lips Habasi and the Thieves’ Road

The South Wall Cornerclub is where Balmora exhales. Low ceiling, smoke-stained beams, adobe that remembers older hands. Lanterns hung just low enough to make tall men duck and short lies sound true. You can smell ash-yam stew fighting skooma sweet, kwama oil in the lamps, wet leather off caravan cloaks. Dice click in the back; a three-beat on the bar means lanterns in the street, keep your name short . Chalk lines crawl the plaster where the wash never reaches—old cant peeled thin: feather marks near the cellar arch (sky clear), a shallow spiral behind the hookah bench (gather tonight), and a sideways V carved in the door (no steel drawn inside).

Sugar-Lips Habasi runs the room like a thief runs a sunbeam—lazy until it leaps. Khajiit, Suthay-raht by the tilt of her ears and the way her tail keeps time with the room. Fur the color of sand with ink spilled on it; whiskers beaded with moon-sugar crystals; gold hoops in one ear, a knife you never see until you wonder why you’re bleeding. Her voice is velvet pulled over a trap—purring, then pressure. She smells of clove and coin. When she laughs, the bottleboy laughs too, because he likes all his fingers.

She called me to the back alcove screened by bead strings and stale incense. Map of Balmora on the wall, but the streets are all names, not lines—Ferryman Ralos, Three-Thumb Uleni, Old-Glove Drel—people as thoroughfares. “Habasi hears a kitten can cross a room without waking a chair,” she purred, watching the way the beads barely swayed when I ducked through. “Habasi would like to see this kitten hunt.”

She gave me the diamond test—flawless stone, upright jeweler, thread-alarm that sings to a bell if you breathe wrong.

At sunrise the next day I cased the shop twice in court-cant—as a cloth buyer talking vat weights, caravan insurance, and mildew riders—then once in pure alley-cant, reading window glass for reflections, counting the proprietor’s blinks, timing the street cry of the saltrice seller to the clerk’s habit of scratching his ear. Ghost powder sifted along the showcase edge made the silk thread gleam; a soap print off the apprentice’s pocket gave me a brass twin by nightfall. I bribed the bell’s tongue with a fleck of beeswax and measured the creak in the floorboard with two copper coins and my breath.

I chose noon for the lift—thiefs here prefer it; eyes expect danger at dusk. Sun high, shadows honest. I leaned into a joke about moth-eaten brocade, palmed slack into the thread, turned the key on the breath between words, and swapped the diamond for paste the way priests swap reliquaries—slow, gentle, as if it already belongs. A cough from the street covered the click I didn’t make. In the alley I left a neat feather mark—wing clean; sky clear—and wrapped the real stone in a rag that looked like it deserved to be ignored.

Back at South Wall, the room bent a little around Habasi the way heat bends above a cookfire. I set the stone on felt. “Sweets to the sweet, and claws to the unkind,” I told her—the old countersign from my boy-thief days. She smiled the way a lock smiles when a key remembers it, and the tail said good . “Habasi approves. Habasi promotes,” she purred, tapping my knuckles where rings leave lessons. From Toad to Footpad, just like that—my first step up the ladder I pretend is a shadow.

She didn’t stop at coin. “This one needs a voice,” she said, and tilted her head. I speak both tongues—the court-cant that sounds like invoices and invitations, and the alley-cant that lives in scratches and the length of a blink. From then on I bridged the room: translating merchant euphemism into doorways and doorways into opportunities. Jobs started finding me before they were spoken aloud. Habasi believes my pulse beats Guild-true. That belief is a tool; I keep it sharp.

When I left, she pressed a small tin into my palm—ground moon-sugar cut with marshmerrow, the sort of kindness that spends well on late doors. “Habasi expects you back richer,” she said. The beads barely moved when I stepped through; the room had already decided where I would be next.

The Masks I Now Wear

To the Thieves Guild, I am an upstart looking to prove himself—thief-Right with steady hands and a fast tongue. In cant, they call me smoke-walker; I leave feather marks where the sky is clear and set dead drops where coin can find its way without seeing daylight. They think my heart beats to the rhythm of the South Wall’s dice. Let them.

To the Fighters Guild, I’m a sellsword with a mind for leadership—blade kept oiled, contracts read line by line. I talk supply and retainers like a foreman, drill like a Redoran for an hour, and then vanish like a rumor. They see edge and discipline, not the hand that weighs the purse first.

To the Mages Guild, a curious agent of House Hlaalu with coin and ambition. I ask the right questions in the wrong libraries and pay my dues before I’m asked. I trade in scroll-favors—a ward for a silence, a scroll of Calm for a name. They think I seek prestige. What I seek is access.

To Caius, I am a dagger sheathed in silk—the boy he found with ash under his nails, sharpened to a point only he and I can see. He sends me to walk where the Empire cannot show its boots and expects me to return with answers, not stories. I learned both dialects from him; now I speak them in places where the ceiling listens.

To the people of Balmora, I’m a returning son who knows which roofs don’t squeak and which stalls sell bread a day old for half. I tip the beggar with the bad leg, return the ring to the widow who didn’t ask, and share a cup with the taxman’s friend. They call me by my name without the House in front of it. That is how I know it’s true.

To the Empire, I am still just a pawn—for now. A pawn that crosses the board learns strange moves; sometimes the board learns them, too.

My next step is clear: pull at the threads that snag every door—find the Sixth House, unriddle the Nerevarine prophecies. I don’t yet know where the path bends, only that it darkens. But I did not come here to fear the dark. I came to walk through it—to read the walls where others see stone, to hear the gods when they only whisper, to cut the knot when listening fails.

Let the gods whisper. Let the Houses scheme. I am watching.

— Nuada Hlaalu

Chapter Text

Chapter 3 – Ink Before Iron
Fourth Entry – 16th of Second Seed, 3E 427
Location: Balmora; Andrano Ancestral Tomb; Vivec City

“The right lock teaches the hand that opens it.”

Caius’s orders sat in my pocket like a coin I didn’t dare spend: find the truth behind the Sixth House and the Nerevarine. There are a dozen doors into a mystery—steel, silver, rumor, prayer—but the one that opens cleanest is ink. So I chose the Mages Guild before blades or bribes. Knowledge first; knives later.

Balmora’s guildhall breathes chalk and formaldehyde. Apprentices hurried past with eyes like safe locks; a conjurer argued with an empty air that occasionally hissed back. I’d already shown my face here—pleasantly forgettable, purse politely heavy—so when I began asking for someone who knew old Temple stories the way a smuggler knows tides, three different mouths formed the same name with three different kinds of caution.

Sharn gra-Muzgob.

Sharn gra-Muzgob and the Price of Knowledge

Sharn received me like an experiment that might explode—smile measured, tusks just visible, eyes counting the coins behind my eyes. “You want the Nerevarine notes,” she said, as if I’d asked for weather and treason in the same breath. “So does every clerk with a conscience and every priest without one. Fetch me a thing, and I’ll fetch you the truth.”

The thing: a skull from the Andrano Ancestral Tomb. Not a relic—a reminder. “The Temple won’t share what’s useful,” Sharn said, laying a chalk-sketched map on the table. “So we take it.” She slid over a twist of bitter herbs—marshmerrow and hackle-lo—“to keep the dead polite,” and a scrap of paper with a list of names the Temple prefers not to hear spoken by outlanders.

I weighed her price the way thieves weigh windows: frame first, then glass. A skull for a secret. Desecration for doctrine. Caius had told me to study rot; Sharn was handing me a shovel.

I left South Wall a message in alley-cant—a narrow feather carved into the stair post: sky clear, but keep your name short —and salted a dead drop behind the third floorboard (knot to the left) with a coin and a note for whichever cat saw me go and didn’t see me come back. Court-cant went out, too: a “routine survey of Temple holdings” entered in a ledger that would be read by exactly the right bored clerk.

I felt something close as I packed. The room cooled where my hands passed over steel; a lockpick tapped once against my ribs like a priest’s blessing that doesn’t claim to forgive. Ink before iron, I reminded myself—and then I checked the edge on both.

The Tomb that Remembers Its Owners

I left Balmora before first bell, when the Odai still talks to stones and the guards talk only to their yawns. South Wall got two messages on my way out: a narrow feather on the stair post ( sky clear; keep your name short ) and three dots in a triangle on the back alley jamb ( storm passed; river calm ). I packed light—lantern hooded tight, Sharn’s bitter herbs, twine, chalk, and a bone key that opens nothing but keeps your fingers honest.

The road took me over the south bridge and along the low terraces where scribs scuttle like bad thoughts. I kept to the ditch-shadow when Legion patrols clattered by and stepped wide of a nix-hound pair learning to be brave. At the Odai ford I left chevrons cut under the cairn ( ferryman good for one more run ) for any cat following at a distance, then cut east, off the main track, across scuttle fields and wind-carved flats. A kagouti watched me from a ridge; I breathed a soft Calm into the air between us until it remembered other errands.

By midday I hit the old pilgrim road that stitches Seyda Neen to Pelagiad—stone waymarkers pitted by salt, shrine niches scraped clean by pious fingers and desperate ones. I rinsed dust at a wayside trough, pressed a coin into a cracked saint’s bowl, and walked on until ash gave way to pale chalk and the hills began remembering their shapes. There, where the land folds like a ledger open to the right page, I found the Andrano Ancestral Tomb crouched beneath a low bluff, its doors carved with careful grief.

I entered on the exhale, as Caius taught me, and let my breath find the room’s rhythm. Lantern soot marked recent visits; old offerings hinted at families that still speak to their dead. I walked cat’s road along the wall, skirting tiles that sang under weight. In the first chamber, an ancestor ghost gathered itself from cold air—robes recalling a life of careful ledgers. I set Sharn’s herbs on the step and spoke Ashlander-courtesy I’d learned young: a name for a stranger, a promise to touch nothing I didn’t have to. The ghost frowned like a clerk interrupted—then settled, watching.

Past two sarcophagi and a cracked relief of a woman with a child, I found the inner vault. The skull I needed lay on a shelf above a bowl of dried salt. I swapped the bowl for a fresh pinch and left a coin from Balmora—Azura’s hush touched the back of my neck at that small balance. Not absolution. Just acknowledgment.

I left the way I came, steps set in the spaces where sound forgets itself. Outside, the wind had shifted. Behind me, the ghosts kept their ledgers. Ahead, Balmora’s roofs would catch the last light if I kept a steady pace—and Sharn’s price would buy me ink enough to start cutting truth.

Notes on Names That Don’t Stay Dead

Sharn kept the skull, brewed a tea that smelled like old pennies, and opened what she called her “book of blasphemies”—not a single volume, but a stack of copied leaves stitched together with red thread and professional caution.

“Here,” she said, tapping with an ink-stained tusk of a fingernail. “ Nerevarine. Not a bedtime story—an idea with teeth. The short of it, without the sermons:”

• Who: A reincarnate champion tied to Nerevar, the Hortator of old. Whether that’s a soul returned, a role repeated, or a lie that got legs depends on who’s paid to answer.
  
  
• Who cares:
  
  
• Temple calls it heresy; the Ordinators make heresy bleed.
  
  
• Ashlanders keep it like a coal under the tongue—hot, quiet, carried far.
  
  
• Dissident Priests collect scraps and contradictions; they prefer questions to worship.
  
  
• Words you’ll hear: The Stranger. Seven Visions. Trials. Moon-and-Star. “Don’t pretend you understand any of them after an afternoon,” Sharn said. “You’ll only convince people you’re a tourist with a knife.”
  
  
• Politics you’ll taste: The Tribunal’s divinity is a ladder and a wall. Some say it was earned; some say it was taken. I am not confirming either in a room with windows.
  
  

She slid across a folio of clipped excerpts—no full texts, just bones to hang thought on: glosses of The Stranger, a tidy outline of the Seven Visions with half the lines missing (“on purpose,” she admitted), and a banned works list featuring a title circled twice: Progress of Truth. “If you happen to find a copy,” she said, “pretend you didn’t. Read it folded into a bookkeeping manual. Then burn the manual.”

A second sheet wore field notes that felt more like a smuggler’s ledger than a scholar’s catechism:

• How to ask in Temple halls: “Antiquarian inquiry,” “comparative hagiography,” “pilgrim topography.” Never say “prophecy” where helmets echo.
  
  
• How to ask among Ashlanders: Bring salt, listen first, call her Wise Woman, never witch. Speak in the past tense until invited to mention the future.
  
  
• How to survive ancestors: A packet of bitter herbs (she gave me one) to put the dead at ease. “They prefer courtesies to cleverness,” she said. “So do I.”
  
  

Last, she gave me a narrow list that wasn’t a list at all—more like a scent trail written in ink: sleepers who mutter in streets, ash statues that travel in crates where gods shouldn’t fit, the word corprus followed by a tidy skull-and-crossbones sketched like a joke that remembers it isn’t. “If rumors have bones,” she said, “they belong to something calling itself House Dagoth. Officially extinct. Unofficially… louder lately.”

I asked what passes for truth in a land that jails it. Sharn smiled without joy. “Truth is a tool. Use the right end. Start small. Ask for stories, not answers. If a priest tells you to stop asking , you’re getting close.”

I copied her essentials twice—once in court-cant (a dust-dry memorandum about “regional eschatologies” that even a censor would nap over), and once in alley-cant skittering across a page of cargo tallies (feathers for safe hours, tilted squares for names to be said inside, not outside). Two dialects, same direction.

At the door she pressed a final, practical gift into my palm: a dog-eared slip that could pass for a Temple burial rite permit at two paces and bad lighting. “Paper isn’t a shield,” she said, “but sometimes it’s a shadow.”

The Ledger That Opens Doors

South Wall gave me the rest of the nudge. A runner—thin wrists, quick shoes—passed me a folded card that smelled faintly of saltrice and sealing wax. House Hlaalu Council Manor, the outer script said; the inner, in court-cant so clean it squeaked: “Factor available to evaluate discrete assets. Present at your convenience.” Alley-cant on the back—just a chalk feather drawn with a steady hand: sky clear .

The Council Manor sits above Balmora like a promise that learned to count. Sand-colored plaster over stone, ledgers stacked behind lattice, the low buzz of deals spoken in voices that never need to rise. I left two small marks in the entry—one angled V near the baseboard ( no steel drawn inside ), and three shallow verticals on the stair’s second riser ( watch turns on the hour )—old habits setting the ground where my feet were about to stand.

Nileno Dorvayn received me in a room that smelled of parchment and dried comberries. She had a merchant’s spine, straight from the coin-box, and a Dunmer’s gaze that measures whether a man belongs in the room he’s already standing in. Her eyes dipped once, almost idly, to the faint threadbare edge of the blanket-crest I keep folded in my pack—the Hlaalu sigil that once swaddled a door-step child.

“Nuada,” she said, as if confirming an inventory. “You come recommended by no one and vouched for by everyone who wisely won’t put their names on paper. Convenient. We like convenient, when it stays useful.”

She didn’t ask for loyalty. She asked for utility. Three small tests, dressed as errands:

• A sealed packet to change hands in the Razorkiss Cornerclub without changing tables—my fingers not on the seal when it arrived.
  
  
• An alchemist’s formula to be copied without the page ever appearing disturbed—ink mirrored in a looking-glass, dried with patient breath.
  
  
• A trader’s debt to be collected without bruises—court-cant over wine, alley-cant in the sign-ring I tapped once on the table (storm coming, pay now).
  
  

I did them the way you fold paper: cleanly, on the lines. When I set the results on Nileno’s desk, she didn’t smile. She re-shelved me. Moved me from stranger to asset .

“You’ll start as Retainer,” she said, sliding a small chit across the wood—a token stamped with Hlaalu scales and a number that opens certain doors. “House Hlaalu appreciates discretion that pays for itself. Show me you understand the difference between a wall and a ladder, and we will hand you better ladders.”

Outside, the council hall’s courtyard had warmed to afternoon. I left a feather-thin mark under the lintel for the cats ( sky clear ), and a short, dry note in court-cant for Caius: Lines identified. Tension applied. Awaiting pull. The Blades like their metaphors mechanical; the Guild prefers them alive. I walk between. And now, with Nileno’s ledger ink on my name, I had my first rung on the House’s ladder—and my first shadow under Temple eyes.

The climb had begun.

House Hlaalu does not ask who your parents were; it asks what you can move without anyone seeing your hands. Nileno Dorvayn tested me the way a coinwright tests a new die—light taps first, then a full strike.

The first taps:

• A debt that wouldn’t die: I visited a clothier who owed back tithe. I didn’t break fingers; I sorted his ledgers and found three lines that could be forgiven without changing totals. He paid the next morning, grateful to the House for its “mercy.” Nileno likes profit that bows.
  
  
• A tithe that wanted thinning: I smuggled a Temple copyist an anonymous endowment. He repaid the “donor” by misplacing a column of Redoran weigh-tolls. Hlaalu caravans came in three percent lighter on paper. Nileno’s eyebrow rose a precise millimeter. Promotion bait.
  
  
• A manifest that walked: In the South Wall, I left alley-cant—two fine verticals under a bench (watch loop breaks here)—then lifted a Redoran bill of lading and replaced it with one that would age into doubt.
  
  

By week’s end I was Oathman. Three days later, Lawman—not for blade-work, but for how quietly a page can turn when you teach it.

Alley-Cant, Court-Cant

Balmora sharpened my tongues. In alley-cant I marked routes for runners—chalk feathers on lintels (sky clear), a tiny ⌖ on a stair lip (patrol knot here). In court-cant I learned to pay compliments in exact weights: one for the clerk’s pride, two for the merchant’s margin, none at all for the Temple unless it was listening.

At twilight, decisions settle straighter. Azura is the hush before you choose; Nocturnal is the cool on your knuckles when the pick finds home. Between them, my steps landed where they meant to.

The First Hlaalu Jobs That Counted

Nileno stopped handing errands and started handing leverage.

• The Ink That Thickens: A Caldera sub-magistrate kept two ledgers—one for coin, one for grudges. I delivered an “anonymous verse” in Curio’s favored meter about his nephew’s guild exam. The ink on the grudge-book dried slow for a week. Hlaalu wagons rolled faster.
  
  
• The Weight of a Seal: A caravan permit “mislaid” at the Odai. I found it inside the lock it was meant to open. My pick left no scratch; my thumb left no sweat. Nileno watched my hands when I returned it, then signed my Lawman patent with a quill that did not squeak.
  
  
• The Quieting of a Lamp Tax: A canal foreman shaved a spoon of wax from each public light. I put a number in his ear that made him imagine the Ordinators asking where shadows come from. Lamps grew honest. He swore he’d thought of it himself.
  
  

“Vivec,” Nileno said at last. “Go be useful to a man who enjoys useful people.”

First Sight of the God-City

I left Balmora at dawn, when the Odai wears steam like a shawl and the stone bridges still remember night. South along the river road, boots ticking time on cobbles, I let habit walk and eyes work. I marked a feather under a mile post (sky clear), then rubbed it out—too many curious boots on this stretch. Guar caravans trundled past with bales of saltrice and scrib jelly; a netch herd drifted like quiet storms over the marsh grass. Twice I stepped off the road to let Legion patrols pass—good men doing useful work, whose usefulness would complicate mine if names got exchanged.

At the fork where the water fattens toward Hla Oad, I cut east, into the Ascadian Isles, a quilt of islets stitched together by stone bridges and farmer patience. The air traded ash for damp earth and kwama musk; plantation bells carried far in the morning calm. I bought a heel of bread with small talk and left a ferryman’s token in a skiff’s rib (paid, one night), then crossed the last low causeway as the tide shouldered the pilings. By noon the wind had a salt edge, and by late afternoon the horizon stopped pretending and turned into Vivec.

Vivec rose out of the Inner Sea like a sentence the land had decided to finish. Eight great cantons squared themselves against the water—Hlaalu, Redoran, Telvanni, St. Olms, St. Delyn, the Foreign Quarter, the Arena, and the Temple—each a hollow mountain of plastered stone with streets stacked inside like drawers. Above them all, the Ministry of Truth hung—a chained moon, a slate of rock held in place by a god’s will and everyone else’s superstition. Its shadow moved slower than time.

Gondoliers called in sing-song along the waist-high canals, their poles tapping cadence against stone. Pilgrims walked in skeins across the bridges, whispering canticles beneath banners that snapped in the salt wind. Buoyant Armigers laughed like young officers in new uniforms. Ordinators did not laugh. Their gold masks watched the world with the patience of held breath; even the gulls veered a little wider around them.

The city smelled of river-salt and resin, cloves burnt at shrines, kwama egg on hot stone. Every surface held a rule: “no loitering,” “no trading,” “no heresy,” written in the slope of a guard’s shoulders, the angle of a priest’s hand, the width of a merchant’s smile. Between the rules, trade breathed—paper folded into bribes, silk folded into promises, hands folded in prayer that was also negotiation.

I moved the way a cat moves when it doesn’t yet know which rooftops belong to it—eyes up, feet light. On the quay of the Foreign Quarter I scratched a discreet feather high on a post (sky clear) for whatever runner took the night routes after me, then checked the roof roads with a glance: three chimneys in a row, second tile band squeaks, avoid. A ferryman’s token rubbed into the underside of a balustrade (one more free ride) would start paying dividends by midnight.

Twilight—the hour that belongs to Azura—laid a blue plate over the canals. The wind shifted; shadows lengthened in helpful directions. I crossed by bridge to Hlaalu Canton, whose corners smell of varnish and quiet ambition, and let myself be seen just enough—hat tipped at a spice-factor I intended to need later, chin lifted at an under-steward who would swear he remembered me from a banquet that never happened.

South face, service stairs, a knock no one admits to hearing. A shutter slid; a pupil measured me; the bolt whispered back. I was announced up a stair that doesn’t exist on any map—through a corridor painted the color of very expensive forgetfulness—and shown into a room that smelled of warmed resin and decisions. The floor was polished to the kind of shine you only risk when you’re sure no one will bleed on it. A low table waited between two chairs that were not quite equal. Somewhere behind a screen, a quill finished a thought and set it aside.

Vivec had greeted me. Now it would test whether I meant to stay.

Crassius Curio, Curtain Up

Finding Curio in Vivec is like finding the heart of a song in a crowded tavern—follow the rhythm other people pretend not to hear.

I started where all rumors go to dress themselves: the Foreign Quarter waistworks. A cloth-factor’s boy swore on his apron that “Councilor Curio” kept rooms “where the walls talk softly” (translation: high-plaza money), while a gondolier folded a ferryman’s token into his palm and admitted the man’s parties sent more trade down-canal than Temple festivals (translation: influential, indulgent, and worth rowing toward). I watched which way Ordinators didn’t look—toward Hlaalu Canton—and took a covered bridge with the tide.

On Hlaalu’s lower waistworks I walked the inside edge—under lantern spill, outside of notice—and read the chalk ghosts under fresh plaster: a sideways V, faint (no steel inside); a single feather rubbed nearly smooth (sky clear); two dots and a line at ankle height (steward can be bought, but not twice). A spice-merchant with soft hands and a stiff smile took a coin I didn’t offer and volunteered that “Councilor Curio entertains on the plaza, south quarter, discreet entrance” (translation: we all pretend not to know, but everyone knows).

Up the pilgrim ramps to the plaza, where banners fussed in the wind and conversations had shadows. Hlaalu guards wore their helmets tilted like polite questions. I drifted past shrines and stallkeepers until I found a door that avoided the sun—a lacquered panel in a stretch of wall that wanted to be ignored. I knocked the quiet pattern that says visitor, not petitioner, and a shutter slid to show an eye that had counted coin since breakfast.

“Appointment?” the eye asked in diction as starched as its cuff.

“A verse for a patron,” I said in court-cant (translation: a small service for a large favor).

A pause. The bolt slid. Inside smelled like beeswax and expensive wood forgetting its tree. A house-steward with a ledger’s spine guided me through corridors that were wider than they needed to be, past a screen painted with tragedy masks—one smiling, one doing something more complicated—and into a receiving room arranged to make people sit where their rank would show.

Crassius Curio wore a robe that was mostly an opinion and a smile that was mostly a test. Rings chimed when he gestured; the air around him had already learned to applaud.

“Ah! The returning son of Balmora,” he sang, as if I were an entrée finally arriving. (You carry rumors like a crest. Prove you can afford them.)

I sketched a bow that could be read three ways and chose the least offensive. “A humble cousin, eager to serve.” (I know you know I’m useful. I won’t price myself loudly—yet.)

He poured wine and watched whether I reached. I didn’t. He approved, then drank for both of us.

“Tell me,” he said, head cocked, “do you prefer doors that open with a knock, or doors that forget they were ever closed?” (Muscle or subtlety?)

“I like doors to remember me, Councilor,” I said. “Whether they open or stay shut depends on the story we’re telling.” (I can do either. I choose what serves your plot.)

He laughed, genuine and pleased that I’d read the script. “Good. So many men in this city ruin a perfectly good entrance by insisting on a march.”

A portfolio slid across lacquer the way a blade slides back into a sheath. I let it arrive and lay there long enough to feel expensive. Then I opened it. Odral Helvi’s name sat on top like a stain that wouldn’t sand out—Caldera mine accounts, a deputy treasurer’s unusual overtime, a warehouse tally that hid five pieces of ebony in numbers that didn’t quite add up. Two minor names braided through: a clerk who ‘admired’ Helvi, and a scribe who believed ink made her invisible.

“Three threads,” Curio said, watching my thumb find the paper’s edge. “All part of one tapestry. Pull one, and I want to know which pattern changes.” (Be decisive. Be discreet. Tell me where the bodies move.)

“Ink first,” I said, tapping the clerk’s hand; “then loyalty, then ore. People confess more than ledgers.”

He reclined, rings clinking. “He can be befriended?”

“Everyone can,” I said. “The receipt is just different.”

Crassius circled me with talk the way a stagehand circles a mark with light—never quite touching, always discovering. He asked nothing about my Blades work and everything a man would ask who already knew. He praised the South Wall ale he never drank, lamented the Redoran habit of wearing honor like armor in the bath, and smiled whenever my answers lined up with his preconceptions without quite confirming them.

We fenced in court-cant:

• He: “Hlaalu thrives when its accountants can balance without distractions.” (Don’t make a mess I must defend in council.)
  
  
• I: “Then I’ll give them a ledger even the Temple would bless.” (I can tidy the crime until it looks like piety.)
  
  
• He: “And you are… unencumbered by rustic scruples?” (Will you do the ugly bits without melodrama?)
  
  
• I: “I prefer results to regrets, Councilor. Regrets don’t pay dividends.” (Yes.)
  
  

He let the smile sharpen. “Splendid. One last thing: if our dear Odral discovers he is being… evaluated, we shall blame ambition, not instruction. You will forgive me; I prefer to write forewords, not confessions.”

“Then I’ll bring you a prologue worth signing,” I said, sliding the portfolio home.

He tested my silence a final time. “Certain swords-for-hire in Vivec have been seen dining with men who do not pay taxes.” (Fighters Guild—Camonna Tong. Do you know?)

“Some men dine where the food is free,” I said. “Others dine where the bill can be sent to a stranger.” (Yes. And I can make that stranger Redoran or Telvanni by dessert.)

Crassius raised his cup. “Decisive. Discreet. Decorative when needed. I do adore a triple threat.”

I left a neat feather with the quill’s point turned inward on his lintel—sky clear, master—habit more than need, and let the unmapped stairs return me to the plaza. The wind off the canals carried incense and coin and the kind of rumor that grows legs if you feed it. Below, gondolas clicked like abacus beads. Above, the Ministry of Truth hung like a thought no one wanted to finish.

As I took the long way down, watching how the canton’s shadows moved if you asked nicely, I felt the House tilt a degree in my favor. Not enough to slide anyone off their chair. Enough that the next door might remember my name before I knocked.

The Work That Earns a Sponsor

Curio’s errands are always two things: what they are, and what they look like to someone listening.

The Clerk Who Forgot a Sum.
I arranged for a Caldera scribe’s ink to run thin on the day a certain Odral receipt needed boldness. His copy bore the weight; the original looked… nervous. Odral’s thread frayed exactly where Curio wanted it to catch.

The Theft You Solve Yourself.
I paid Elmussa—Guild sister, careful hands—to stage the wrong missing crate. We “found” it together in just the right place and “lost” a list Curio preferred misplaced. My reputation for competence arrived three steps ahead of me.

Back to Balmora.
I took the road north and shook Vivec’s perfume off at the Odai bridge. Nileno Dorvayn heard my accounting in her upstairs office—the part you only reach if the ledger likes your name. I laid receipts and rumors where she could smell the truth on both. 

She tapped a quill against her teeth, then inked Kinsman beside my name with three clean strokes.

 “Don’t mistake ascent for arrival,” she said, which in Hlaalu means take the stair, own the landing .

South Wall Evening.
I celebrated where I was made—South Wall Cornerclub, smoke low and laughter cheap. Sugar-Lips Habasi purred a toast that sounded like a threat to anyone who didn’t know it was affection. Cats clinked clay cups with the care of people who know what glass costs. Someone scratched a feather on the table edge ( sky clear ); the barkeep gave three soft taps when lanterns drifted past the shutters ( keep your name short ). I bought a round for the ferryman who forgets faces and the runner who never forgets routes. For a few breaths the Guild was a family and I was just a son who’d done well.

The Golden Mask

Sleep took me crooked over a corner bench, boots on, purse forward. The lantern’s sway became a pale moon with a seam, and I was walking a hall of stone lined with the dead.. I stood in a place that remembered being a tomb before it learned to be an audience chamber—stone ribs arching overhead, ash settling like quiet applause. A figure waited where aisles meet altar, robed in heat-haze and wearing a mask like a sunrise hammered flat. When he spoke, there were no words, only the feeling that a door behind my thoughts had opened.

He led me through rows of the unbreathing, and the dead turned their faces as if to catch a blessing. He touched a corpse’s brow with two fingers and the body smiled without lips. When he laughed, the room inhaled. My chest forgot how.

Nerevar, the not-voice said, as if naming a tool that had been misplaced.
Friend. Betrayer. Return.

The floor softened underfoot—stone becoming cinder, cinder becoming lung. A pulse beat through the walls, slow and tidal; each throb pushed red light through the seams of the world until the air tasted of coin and warm iron. I tried to draw steel and found my hands full of nothing that cut everything. The mask tilted, patient, as if waiting for a lesson I had once promised to remember.

A wind rose from under the floor and brought with it whispers in my own voice, each one confident and all of them wrong. When I looked up, the ceiling was Red Mountain’s throat; when I looked down, the stones were names I knew I would step on anyway.

Come to me, the heat said.
Come home.

The dead began to applaud.

 I woke with my hand on a dagger and ash on my tongue. South Wall’s noise rushed back—the scrape of chairs, dice mutters, Habasi’s chuckle two rooms over—but the dream stayed, sitting in the dark like a guest who intends to remain.

The Cornerclub Ceiling

The South Wall smelled of comberry wine and old wood. Someone snored behind a screen; the dice boys had finally gone to ground; a lute dreamed into its own strings. I lay on the cot in my corner and watched the lamplight wobble against the ceiling beams, the dream’s ash still in my lungs.

I sat up slow, listened to my breathing until it remembered whose it was.

On the shelf, I left a sliver of alley-cant for any friend who came looking after I’d gone—two short strokes, one long: out on quiet business; wake me only if the house forgets how to breathe. Habit. Comfort. Insurance.

The room had become too small for the questions I couldn’t name. I took the stairs.

Answerless Sky

Balmora’s rooftops had cooled to slate. The river stitched the city together with a thread of dull silver; the canton lights made islands of certainty and left the alleys to Nocturnal. I stepped into the gap between two chimneys and let the night fit around me like a well-made scabbard.

The stars were out—sharp, busy, indifferent. I tried to read them the way a thief reads a window latch: check the give, test the catch, learn the maker’s habit. Nothing. The closest thing to an answer was Azura’s hour sliding its last pale ribbon off the horizon, the kind of twilight afterthought that says, you’re late, but not too late. It settled my hands.

I thought of the dream’s golden mask and the way the dead had watched me like investors. I thought of how the word Nerevar sat in my mouth like an oath and a bad idea. I breathed until the night decided to keep me, and when it did, the rooftops remembered where to put my feet.

Somewhere below, a coin dropped; two streets over, a shutter closed wrong; on the far bank, an Ordinator paused half a step too long. Threads tugged. The web held.

I watched the constellations until they became routes, not reasons. When the cold reached my bones and made up my mind for me, I went back down the wall I’d come up, as if I had always belonged on both sides of it.

The sky didn’t answer. It never does. But it left the light just long enough for me to see the next lock.

Reflections by the Water Stairs
Two months on this Island, and the threads tighten. Sixth House whispers in doorways that don’t lead anywhere, and men with golden masks walk my dreams and call me by names older than mine. House Hlaalu begins to smile when I enter, a sure sign that someone has decided my profit is theirs. The Guild trusts my hands; the Blades trust my ears.

At the water stairs of the Hlaalu Canton, I watched lantern light ripple into black. Nocturnal cooled the night the way she does when the next step matters; Azura set a single star where it would draw my eye north.

Tomorrow I bring Caius my seditious archaeology and a list of men who wake speaking to gods they do not name at breakfast. After that, whatever door opens when you knock with both a dagger and a prayer.

The mask with the grin is watching. So am I.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Master Thief in the Making • Kinsman of House Hlaalu
Wet Ear of the South Wall’s Shadows • The Blade Who Listens

Chapter Text

Chapter 4 – Cant and Canton
Fourth Entry – 18th of Second Seed, 3E 427
Location: Hlaalu Canton, Vivec City

“A spy collects truths like blades—useful, dangerous, and never drawn without reason.”

The next morning, Caius and I sat inside his house like two travelers sharing stories, trying to stay warm in twilight. 

Caius listened like a locksmith—ears to tumblers, waiting for something to catch. I laid Sharn gra-Muzgob’s notes on his table in two tongues: the Blades’ neat court-cant (dates, fragments, cross-referenced rumors) and a second copy scattered through a dock ledger in alley-cant for when paper needs to look dull. He skimmed the first, weighed the second with a thumb, then set both beside his cold cup.

“Good,” he said, and the word landed like a hand on the shoulder. “Stories with corners I can grab.”

I told him what I had, and what I didn’t. Nerevar remembered as a man, not a statue. The Sixth House as a waking rumor. The Temple’s fear louder than its sermons. I did not tell him about the golden mask that had followed me home from South Wall and sat in the dark like a guest who intended to stay.

Caius rolled a leaf between his fingers, didn’t light it. “Pages can be forged. People are harder.” He tore a scrap from a shipping circular and wrote three names as if they were directions to a door only we could see.

“Addhiranirr,” he said first. “Khajiit. Thief. Foreign Quarter underways. The Temple wants her quiet, which means I want her loud.”

“Huleeya,” he added. “Argonian. Scholar among drunks. You’ll find him orbiting Jobasha’s Rare Books or the Black Shalk Cornerclub. Mind the locals—pride makes poor listeners.”

“Mehra Milo,” last. “Temple scribe with a heretic’s spine. Hall of Wisdom. She’ll talk if she trusts that you won’t hang her with your curiosity.”

He slid the scrap across the table, then, after a heartbeat, dragged a candle to the edge and burned it to ash. “You’ll remember. Better that no one else does.”

I nodded. “Contacts, not citations.”

“People, not pages,” he corrected, dry smile showing through the rags. “Walk soft. Ask sideways. Bring me chatter that bleeds.” He tapped the window frame twice—our old signal for lanterns are out, road is yours —and added, quieter, “And mind the Temple. They teach devotions; they practice denials.”

I palmed my copies back into my coat—ink for emperors, cant for cats—and left a feather mark with my thumb on his lintel where only we would notice ( sky clear ). Outside, Balmora’s morning was just starting to argue with itself: market voices, the Odai talking to stones, a rumor trying to decide if it was true.

Caius sent me south with parchment orders and unspoken tests: find people, not pages. Dangerous people. Hidden people. People who speak the way I do when the room is listening. I carried more than the Emperor’s seal into Vivec—a name from a dream and a mask that smiled behind my eyelids. I did not tell Caius. Some truths are best observed in silence.

Vivec takes you by the ears first—water and hammering, prayers and haggling braided into one long sound. I came in by siltstrider to the Foreign Quarter docks and let the city read me while I read it back. Lanterns wrote their loops on the water; Ordinators traced triangles along the quay tops; bargemen drew court-cant in the air with their poles—prices, lies, schedules that were true only for the men saying them. I walked the outer lip of the canton where sea spray turns stone honest, bought a bowl of spiced marshmerrow I didn’t eat, and listened. Names travel faster than boats here; the ones Caius wanted—cat in hiding, lizard scholar, Temple scribe with a dangerous spine—were all present in the negative space of conversations, like letters rubbed off a sign you still know how to read.

I traded small courtesies for large rumors. A ferryman who “lost” his cargo (paid a bribe) found it again when I fronted him two drakes for a different memory; a dockhand with chalked knuckles laughed at my accent until I corrected his feather mark (he’d written roof road clean where he meant sky clear ). Jobasha’s Rare Books had a line at the counter; I left a slip there anyway—three dots in a triangle, storm passed —to tell any Guild-eye I was walking the underways. By the time the marshmerrow cooled, the city had told me where to start.

Addhiranirr: The Cat Who Watches From Shadows

The Foreign Quarter is a ledger of languages. I read it with cant before I tried words: a chalk fishhook on the third pier piling—fence drinks fair; two short verticals near the maintenance hatch—watch loop breaks here; a sideways V scratched into a drain lip—no steel inside. Cats have been talking to one another across these stones for years.

Addhiranirr was the rumor behind those signs—Khajiit, Guild, hunted. Ordinators had turned the Underworks into a sieve for her. I followed a trail of alley-cant that only a cat would notice—powdered kwama chitin mounded twice at a junction (turn twice and you lose the lanterns), a thin line of fish oil along the right wall (hug right; left is noise). I found her where the sewer meets the empty air, tail low, eyes high.

“Outlander walks like a bell with the clapper tied,” she said. Compliment, from a cat. She tested me with prices I shouldn’t pay and countersigns I shouldn’t know; I paid what mattered and returned the countersign I learned at South Wall—“Sweets to the sweet, and claws to the unkind.”

She spoke corner-cant more than Cyrodilic: “Lanterns sniff. A Census moth flew close—now no wings. Temple has long hands; long memory. Sleepers talk to stones.” Her “moth” was a contact in the Census Office who passed cult rumors and then vanished into neat paperwork.

I left her coin and a feather mark where a cat could see it later—wing clean; sky clear—and a different sign on a girder only an Ordinator would notice—circle broken—to keep them arguing about which way she ran. Nocturnal cooled the tunnel as I went.

Huleeya: The Argonian Scholar

I didn’t start with doors; I started with rumors. A fishmonger on the Foreign Quarter quay muttered, “Scale-quill who reads storms sits where ale dies loud,” and pointed his chin inland. On a stairpost two levels up someone had scratched a cat’s spiral beside a tiny star— turn once, then roof road; scholar drinks below . Jobasha’s clerk, all polite dust and long memory, coughed into his sleeve: “If one were seeking an Argonian of letters, one might try where the Black Shalk burns too hot for books.” Three different tongues, same map.

The Black Shalk Cornerclub smells of old sweat and new grudges. Huleeya, an Argonian with a scholar’s calm, had gathered a ring of Dunmer who mistook their accent for authority. I slid into the space between their boots and his chair and changed the music: “Drinks on me—for good listeners.”

Three cups later, the loudest was explaining to me the philosophy of punching while his friends discovered their legs had been volunteered to find another tavern. I added a thread of Calm to the air—Illusion light as salt—and the room forgot why it was angry.

“Walk,” I said to Huleeya, and we did. I left a broken circle on the doorjamb— storm brewing; avoid this door —and took him to Jobasha’s Rare Books, where books are piled like arguments waiting to be had.

Huleeya unpacked Nerevarine prophecies with a surgeon’s hands. “Older than the Temple’s calendar,” he said. “Kept in Ashlander mouth, not Temple ink. Myth is only history the victors forgot to copy.” Jobasha, who collects forbidden things the way others collect teapots, slid a wrapped folio across to me without unwrapping it. “Read the margins, sera,” he murmured. “The Temple keeps nothing in the center that can cut.”

Azura’s hush sat in that little shop like a third librarian. I left a cant dot on the stair— good ferryman, two runs left —for the next cat in need of quiet ink.

Mehra Milo: Priestess of Doubt

I didn’t knock on the Temple’s front door; I read its habits. Jobasha’s boy sketched me a monk’s circuit in the dust—bell, incense, hymn, silence—and a fishwife on the waistworks swore the “small priestess with the quick eyes” left the Hall of Wisdom at odd hours with books that didn’t match the hymns. In the canalworks I found a scratched circle with a tail— scribe’s road —and followed it to a side entrance where novices traded empty inkpots for full.

I went twice by daylight to learn the pulse: the book carts’ squeaks counted ninety heartbeats between floors; the acolyte at the west colonnade favored his left knee and stopped for gossip at the third pillar; the Ordinator on the high loop turned for the light on the water every fourth pass. I bought a hymnbook and an apology from a copyist with a sweet tooth—two ash-yam buns for a look at the sign-out ledger. The name I needed appeared in neat columns: Mehra Milo, margins crowded with topics the censors pretend don’t exist.

That night I returned in a novice’s robe, ash on my brow and silence on my boots. A breath of Chameleon blurred the edges of me; the Skeleton Key learned a records door in one turn and taught it back without a click. Her hand was in the room before she was: a pile of folios arranged by a mind that files in constellations, not straight lines. I left a cant pinprick under the desk— good ferryman; one crossing —and waited where the corridor forgets how to echo.

She came on the downbeat between bells, alone.

The Hall of Wisdom is a maze with guards for walls. Mehra Milo met me in a corridor that pretends to be a library; her eyes counted steps louder than her mouth counted words. She walked me past shelves until the air itself learned discretion, then let the truth out in careful breaths.

“The Nerevarine is not merely heresy,” she said, “it is a silence the Temple enforces. We are commanded not to think in certain shapes.” She passed me Temple fragments tucked inside a hymnbook—a hymn the censors never sing. “Read the ink and what’s in between,” she warned.

She didn’t ask who I was for; she asked who I was against. I didn’t answer. I did, however, leave a glass-scratch in the reading room—two chevrons nested— ferryman here, but bring prayer —for cats who come dressed as worshipers.

As we parted, an Ordinator turned his helm and the world narrowed. Nocturnal drew my shadow up over my shoulder like a hood; Azura set a single shard of light where his eye slits looked. He saw the light, not me.

The Truth I Withhold

I didn’t take the straight road back to Balmora. In Vivec I moved through the canalworks where lanterns don’t reflect, crossed two waistbridges with my hood low, and bought a quiet berth on a silt strider from a handler who knows how to forget a face. The beast sang its long, hollow song as the cantons fell behind—stone stacked like verdicts—and the marsh light bled into ashland dusk.

I spent the ride counting horizons and filing what I’d learned into two ledgers in my head. Court-cant first: names, dates, places—Addhiranirr hunted and hidden; Huleeya’s testimony that the prophecies breathe older than Temple ink; Mehra’s fragments and warnings. The kind of bones Caius can stack into a skeleton that walks. Then alley-cant: routes, loops in the watch, a good ferryman at the Foreign Quarter with two runs left, a maintenance hatch whose hinge prefers soap. The kind of map that keeps cats alive.

At a waystop north of Suran I left a dead drop for South Wall—two chevrons scratched under a bench slat, a folded note in dull ink: watch turns early on the third bell; moth clipped in the Census; use the east stairs. I took my own advice and used none of those stairs, slept sitting up against a warm chitin plate while the strider dreamed of salt flats.

Balmora rose like a familiar lie. The Odai hissed under the bridges, and the cornerclub windows wore last night’s smoke. I went to Caius as the market opened—bread steam in the air, the same three hawkers rehearsing the same three lies—and laid two reports on his table. The Blades copy in tidy scholarship: who said what, where, and how sure. The Guild copy in chalk-stroke shorthand: doors that open, guards who blink, the ferryman who drinks fair.

I told him about the Ordinators sniffing in the Underworks, about the Census clerk whose wings were clipped, about which canals to avoid until the water forgets. I gave him Mehra’s careful heresies and Huleeya’s older-than-Temple threads. He listened the way he always does—like a man measuring the room for exits while he measures you for the truth.

What I didn’t give him was the part I can’t yet weigh: the golden mask that walks my sleep like it owns the floorboards; the Sleeper in Balmora who knew my name as if he’d named it first; the way Red Mountain hums at the edge of hearing when I am most alone. I could see the lines those admissions would draw on Caius’s ledger—boxes with my name in them that lead to places I might not choose.

So I held them. Not out of distrust, but out of craft. Some truths I am still measuring with my own hands before I place them in another’s. A spy knows when to report and when to reconnoiter his own mind. Caius took the parchment and the silence both. He has trained me long enough to know that sometimes the space around a word is the most honest thing in the room.

The Web Grows Wider

Between cantons and cornerclubs, I feel the eyes:

• House Hlaalu smiles wider when I enter a room—dangerous generosity.
  
  
• The Thieves Guild offers risks with better odds—dangerous kindness.
  
  
• The Fighters and Mages speak of opportunities—dangerous boredom.
  
  

And beneath it all, the Sixth House dreams awake. Questions forget their answers when I ask them; names fall out of men’s mouths like teeth; strangers wake with ash on their tongues and recognize me when I’ve never met them.

I’ll keep walking the orders Caius sets in front of me, for now. But I’m past observation. I leave cant for cats and ink for emperors, and the space between them is where I stand.

Let the Houses scheme. Let the gods whisper. Nocturnal keeps my steps soft; Azura points out which star to follow when the roof has no tiles.

I am in this story now. And more and more, it feels like the story knows my name.

— Nuada Hlaalu

Chapter Text

Chapter 5 – Titles and Towers
Fifth Entry – 28th of Second Seed, 3E 427
Location: Odai Plateau, Bitter Coast

“Influence is never inherited—it is taken, piece by piece, from those too careless to guard it.”

Three months in Morrowind and the ash no longer settles on me; it settles behind me—in my footprints, in the seams of doors I’ve opened and closed again. The masks feel lighter now. Useful. This month I moved beyond infiltration. I began to build. If I tend these roots carefully, they’ll strangle other ambitions before anyone remembers where mine began.

Velvet Assignment: Odral Helvi

The summons came on perfumed vellum, a little too pink for good taste and sealed with a splash of green wax: CRASSIUS CURIO requests the pleasure, et cetera—court-cant for come to Vivec now and pretend we’re old friends . The South Wall barkeep set it on the counter with three soft taps (lanterns about), and I read the subtext in the flourishes. Curio didn’t write letters; he set scenes.

I took the silt strider south at dusk, letting the Odai’s breath turn to marsh air. On the platform I scratched a feather under the rail (sky clear) for the next cat, then rode in with the traders and the tired. Vivec rose in steps of stone and decree, cantons stacked like verdicts. I slipped through the Foreign Quarter’s under-roofs, crossed a waistbridge where no one looks up, and found Hlaalu Canton at Azura’s hour, its lamps already deciding which faces to flatter.

A stair that isn’t on any map brought me to Curio’s door. Inside: warmed resin, overfond curtains, the calculated echo of laughter from a room I never saw. Crassius wore a robe that was mostly an opinion and poured wine as if it were a question. We fenced briefly in pleasantries—his sport, my warm-up—before he tapped a ledger with two fingers.

“Odral Helvi,” he said, silk over steel. “A useful man who occasionally forgets whom his usefulness serves. I need you to… remind him. Gently. Follow. Befriend. Observe. Report.” A pause, then more honest instructions: “I want his night seals copied and his day books compared. Test his deputy with a small impropriety and see if he bites. Let a crate go missing and find it in the right place. If he’s skimming Caldera ebony, I want the thread, the needle, and the hand that sews. Quietly. If he shouts, it must be at himself.”

He slid a portfolio across the lacquer: three names braided into one problem—Odral; a counting-room clerk with a gambler’s pulse; a deputy who owed a favor to the wrong ferryman. “Turn them without leaving fingerprints,” Curio smiled. “And one more thing—deliver this to Dram Bero’s people.” A sealed letter thin as a knife. “We’ll call it… continuity of courtesy .”

His last word, as I stood, was not about Odral. “Mind the Tong,” he said lightly, the way a man mentions weather that drowns ships. “Morag shrines behind respectable doors; writs folded into alms. Rise too fast and someone commissions your humility. And the Camonna have ugly friends in the Fighters Guild—don’t let their shadow mistake itself for yours.”

I left a feather on his lintel (sky clear, master)—habit more than need—and took the invisible stairs down into the city’s moving throat.

Back in Odral’s orbit, I laid a grid of cant across his days: a chalk fishhook on the back stair (ferryman drinks fair); three short verticals by the counting-room threshold (watch turns on the hour); a tiny feather under the desk lip (sky clear—work now). South Wall runners rotated in as “clerks” and “pages,” brush-passes so smooth the paper never existed except between palms. I matched Odral’s stride, laughed at his jokes, learned his silences. By week’s end I knew which drawer hid the private ledger, which seal he used for night letters, and which smile he put on when he meant to rob a friend.

And I tuned my routes accordingly: never the same roof-road twice in a ten-day; decoy errands that end nowhere; dead drops marked with a broken circle (storm spent—change your path). I warned the cats without saying names—two crossed pins on the notice board (knives about)—and let my shadow be smaller than my voice in council, my voice smaller than my shadow in alleys. If the Tong watched—and they do—they would see a man busy, not loud; present, not predictable.-

The Fall of Odral Helvi

The rot announced itself in paper. Sealed letters to an assistant treasury clerk —urgent, private. Steam loosened the wax; the lock pick made quick work. Inside: double books, diversions, percentages that vanished into unknown benefactors . I resealed, reseated, and let the corruption grow heavy enough to hold a trap.

Odral next named a thief: Elmussa, one of ours, “stealing from the Caldera Ebony Mine.” I found her first by cant—a broken circle scratched under a bridge ( storm coming; lie still ). She was caught between coin and House, shame and hunger. I rewrote a line in a storeman’s ledger, planted a miscount in a competitor’s crate, and let Odral congratulate himself for a theft that never happened. Elmussa walks free. Odral slept better.

Then he overreached. He asked me to forge land deeds, to slide properties like coins across a table to those same invisible benefactors. I copied the hand, introduced a flaw only a guilty clerk would miss, and filed the bait where the right eyes would find it.

The last weight was ebony—five raw chunks, unregistered. “Move them,” Odral said, “quietly.” I nodded and set the table: a ferryman in the Foreign Quarter primed with sleep (bribe), a Legion logbook ‘corrected’ in court-cant, and a Blades contact who likes his promotions lukewarm. We arranged a drop beneath Vivec’s Hlaalu Canton—my Guild cats marked the route with twin chevrons ( one more clean run ).

When Odral came to bless his own cleverness, the Imperial Legion stepped from the shadows and took him by the wrists. He shouted conspiracy as if the word were a shield. In Vivec, shouting is just a way to mark where the law should stand. No one looked at me. My feather mark on the exit said what I didn’t: wing clean; sky clear .

The Keep on the Plateau

Crassius made a ceremony of it, of course.

Vivec’s Hlaalu Canton, his manor draped in velvets that smelled like someone else’s fortune. He had a quill behind one ear and a script in his lap that was mostly sighs and half-buttoned shirts. When he saw me, he clapped like a child given a sharper toy.

“My indispensable indiscretion,” he cooed, and from a coffer pulled a scroll bound in blue silk and sealed three times—once with his crest, once with the Bureau of Land and Tithes in Balmora, and once with wax that had never seen daylight. “A trifling trifle. An **‘odious’ plateau,” he winked, “—how do the clerks say it?—Odai.”

He pressed it into my hand and let the silence do the arithmetic. The language inside was Hlaalu to its marrow— freehold and usufruct in perpetuity , drainage easements enumerated like commandments, timber rights and river approach set “to the convenience of the holder.” A deed that said what it did not say: a seat—mine—above the Odai where the mist eats sound and gulls argue with the wind.

“Because you make my problems quiet,” Curio murmured, voice low and suddenly steel. “Because Redoran needs a new horizon. Because men who can keep things should occasionally be given something to keep. Build a house, darling. Then build me a future in it.”

He kissed the air near my cheek and went back to his sighs. On the ribbon’s inside, in court-cant, a thin ink line: Dockmaster owes us winter, not money. Pay him in spring.

I came to the Odai by the low road, where the river chews its banks and the reeds keep secrets. From a rise I saw it first: a shoulder of cliff with old stone ribs showing through, towers half-born and greened over with netch-moss like forgotten fur. Gulls argued against the wind; cliff racers carved silent letters in the sky. The river pitched its voice to the sea and got only hiss for answer. The place did not welcome me. It measured me.

I walked the perimeter on the exhale, fingers brushing lichen and mortar, counting what the rock would give and what it would take. Cat’s road along the parapet: good sightlines, bad footing. A natural shelf under the south face: a promise of a sally port if you cut the stone where it already wants to part. Two game trails pinched together above a drop—the right spot for a chokepoint and a blind where an archer can think in peace. I knelt where the Odai gnaws the cliff and tasted the spray. Bitter. Clean. Mine.

The first night I slept on a cloak in the ruin of the great hall, roof a broken chessboard of tiles and stars. The fire took grudgingly and smoked like an old debtor; the wind carried river damp into my bones and left plans behind when it went out again. I placed a coin under a loose stone for luck—the kind that arrives because you bought it—and a white feather between two blocks for the birds to argue over in the morning. Somewhere between the last crackle and the first light, the choice settled: Velath Morain—Secret Ascent. A place to climb without being seen climbing.

It is not a fortress—yet. Stone ribs open to the mist; towers wear netch-moss like old fur. The cliff throws its voice to the slaughterfish and gets only hiss for answer. But it is mine.

We named it Velath Morain—Secret Ascent. I seeded it with people who owe me more than coin:

A ferryman to run the Odai by night. Two taps under the second pier means safe launch; three is stand down; a long drag of the pole on stone says eyes on the bluff. He laughs like someone who’s forgotten how, but his hands know a current’s temper better than most men know their wives.

Three cats out of South Wall to keep the cat’s roads swept and the dead drops dry. The eldest counts roofs like other men count prayers; the youngest never uses the same shadow twice. Third merlon on the north wall hides a waxed tube; fourth chapel step creaks twice to say don’t use this door. Their chalk breathes and vanishes with the dew, the way good warnings should.

A cook who listens more than he seasons; a healer who asks no questions but remembers all scars; six mercenaries whose loyalties were written first in debt and then in dinners, then finally in the quiet way a place starts to feel like the only ground that doesn’t move. They patrol by habit, not by order. That is how you know a place is beginning to work.

I laced cant into the stone the way masons pack mortar:

Feather marks on the postern (sky clear unless rubbed out).

A tilted square near the main gate (no steel drawn inside).

A shallow spiral behind the cistern (meet at moonrise).

Two fine verticals on the inner stair (watch loop breaks here).

A broken circle chalked low on the west buttress (storm spent; change your route).

I set harmless chimes where drafts tell truths—shells on gut, tin tongues in clay throats. If a window lies about the wind, the house tells me. If a door lies about who opened it, the halls do.

A sally port drops to a ledge where the Odai gnaws; a false pantry opens to a tunnel wide enough for a runner with a wounded friend. The roof road crosses from west tower to east on tiles that don’t squeak—two black, three grey, one cracked, then the chimney. We oil the hinges with siltfish fat; it takes cold better than tallow and offends hounds less.

On the maps men boast about, Velath Morain is a “drainage improvement” and “river groyne maintenance.” In the ledgers that matter, it is a harbor for things that prefer not to be seen docking. I keep Curio’s seal handy for arguments that should end in a signature, not a sword.

At dusk, when the fog lifts and the sea shows its knives, Nocturnal feels like she lives in the mortar—cooling the stone under my palm—and Azura hangs low on the horizon, a single star that knows when to appear. Between them, the keep remembers how to listen. Between them, I remember what silence can do.

By the third day the first routines were set: ferryman’s taps rolling soft under the pier, cats testing roof-road tiles and laughing when one sings, mercenaries learning the walk that looks lazy and isn’t. We planted wickwheat where the soil keeps secrets, set fish traps under the boil where slaughterfish forget you if you feed them on time, and raised a mast on the west tower for the signal flags no one will ever admit seeing.

I am informed by Crassius that an architect, Burbul gro-Rush, will come later with angles and arches—an Orc whose hands square stone and whose mind straightens men. He can have my coin and my secrets in equal measure. For now, Secret Ascent is ribs and promise, a throat cleared before the song.

And under the second pier, where the river keeps its own counsel, the ferryman taps twice.

The Guild Within the Guild

Time passes, and Habasi sent me north, but not before she tied rank to my wrist.

In Balmora, upon my return from Vivec with Hlaalu colors around my shoulders, Sugar-Lips watched me work three nights running—no words, just that slow Khajiit blink when you’ve pleased her and don’t yet know how. On the fourth, she scratched a chalk feather over her door ( sky clear; step up ), looped a black silk thread round my wrist, and tapped the table twice.

“Footpad,” she purred. “Nuada walks with the Guild’s feet. He does not trip them.”

The room answered the way families do when the word family would make it weak: a cup set at my elbow from no one in particular; two fine verticals nicked into the jamb by my cot ( watch loop breaks here ); a broken circle chalked on the South Wall stair ( storm spent; change your route ). Balmora breathes in alley-cant, and I had learned its lungs.

Then she sent me to Ald’ruhn, where the air is drier and the cant runs in bone, not chalk.

Aengoth the Jeweler

Ald’ruhn rises out of the ash like a vow kept too long. Redoran huts crouch beneath chitin ribs, doorframes banded in scarlet lacquer, banners stiff with grit. Everything leans into the wind here—lanterns hooded, voices low, guards walking with scarves over their mouths. And over it all: Skar, the hollowed carapace of some ancient, impossible beast, big enough to roof a district. Its shell creaks when the gusts really bite; the whole city seems to listen to that sound and remember who they are.

I came in with a strider caravan and peeled off near the merchants’ run, reading the city in chalk before I trusted words. Redoran cant is drier than Balmora’s: a single notch cut small under a lintel (no steel inside); two ash-smudged chevrons on a post (ferryman good for one more run); a faint spiral near a rain-catcher (meet at moonrise—bring your own exit). I left a feather high on a crab-shell rib—sky clear—for whatever cat worked the roof roads after me, and followed the marks to the cornerclub where the Guild keeps its pulse under Redoran noses.

Inside it smelled of kwama brandy and wet leather. The tables were low, the talk lower. A back stair that didn’t quite belong led to a room that pretended to be storage: crates, cloth, a jeweler’s bench with its tools put away too neatly to be honest. That’s where I met Aengoth the Jeweler.

He had a mind like a trap with silk lining. Every gem in his cases was an alibi; every facet, a way out. He glanced at my face only long enough to file it, then took inventory of my hands—callus on the first joints, steady wrists, the nick on my right thumb where a lock once learned my blood. He nodded as if the hands had introduced me correctly.

“We’ll start with quiet,” he said, voice like felt over wood. “If you can be silent, we’ll see if you can be loud.”

The first job was Redoran-straight on paper, Guild-crooked in practice: lift a ledger from a house steward without “moving the ink.” I mapped his routine in chalk and patience, breathed Chameleon over the study, warmed the wax on his seal so it held its story, and slid the book out and its perfect twin in without teaching the dust a new pattern. When the steward opened it at supper, his figures behaved themselves like they’d never left.

The second was a knot meant to see how I cut: return a ring to a widow who didn’t know she’d lost it yet. The husband had pawned it to cover a debt and died between drinks. I walked the ring back through three hands and one memory, pressed it into her palm with a lie kind enough to keep, and left a cant mark on the stoop—three small dots in a triangle: storm passed; river calm.

The third I took before Aengoth could test me with it, because a Guild earns its captains, not the other way round: a Redoran caravan route gone “unlucky.” I found the luck in a foreman’s dice and a guard’s new boots, salted a rumor in the right tavern, and returned the crates to the books without returning them to the owners. The House blamed bandits; the Guild counted lessons; I memorized which guards blush and which ones sweat.

Aengoth raised me from Operative to Captain on the back of those three—two done so clean the dust forgot to settle, and one done before he asked. He shook my forearm the Redoran way, then slid a thin packet of routes and debts across the bench the Guild way. “A Captain keeps the roads,” he said, “and remembers who owns the shoes.”

I left a feather on the stairpost (sky clear), a broken circle on the outer jamb (storm spent—change your route), and stepped back into the ash with a city’s new dialect under my tongue and its locks already learning my name.

Captain

Aengoth made a ceremony of nothing, the way real captains do. He poured a lid of sujamma over a paving stone—for the dead, or the thirsty; with thieves it’s the same—then pressed a small brooch into my palm: a sliver of cut glass set in tin, guildwork humble enough to pass any frisk and bright enough for those who know to see.

“Captain,” he said. “You set the watches. You teach the cats when to purr and when not to breathe. We don’t need heroes. We need schedules.”

We went to work.

• I mapped lantern loops on Redoran streets—three-count, six-count, drunk-count—and built a rota that slid our runners between them like knives between ribs.
  
  
• I tuned the dead drops: one pebble left high means pull the parcel; two low means walk on; a feather tucked spine-out says sky clear until moonrise only.
  
  
• I standardized our talk: taught Balmora’s alley-cant to Ald’ruhn’s bone-dry marks, and translated back the local quirks—tilted square for no steel inside, double notch for ferryman good for one more run.
  
  
• I opened a grace book: three names ahead for widows and busted hands, paid out of the pockets I made fatter the night before. A hungry crew makes loud mistakes; a fed one disappears.
  
  

Habasi’s silk thread stayed knotted at my wrist—her old token from South Wall—swapped now for deep blue netch-cord, our color for you work for the Guild even when nobody sees you . In backrooms where wine is honest because the lies do all the work, I spoke court-cant so factors thought they were being clever; in alleys I spoke chalk and thumb so the young cats learned where the floorboards don’t squeak.

We set routes the Redoran way—plain on the surface, complicated underneath. Roof roads crossed on tiles that remember your weight; cellar paths counted breaths instead of steps. I drilled pullbacks: if a patrol breaks early, you break earlier; if a bell rings, you become inventory. No one plays bravado on my time.

At dusk, the city cooled enough for hands to do careful things. At the lip of night there was always just enough light on a latch to read what it wanted to be. Between those moments, the Guild within the Guild breathed—and I learned to breathe for it.

Aengoth’s last lesson came without words: a tiny star cut under his own lintel where only a captain would check. Message received. The roof road is clean—so long as I keep it so.

Reflections Beneath the Storm
I should feel triumphant. Instead I count debts the way a jeweler counts facets—turning each to the light until it answers the eye. The golden mask still walks my sleep, laughing among the dead as if they were wedding guests. In the quiet between waves I hear the Sixth House like a low hum under silk, rot beneath perfume.

Caius grows distant in his orders, as if measuring me for a suit that can walk without a tailor. Crassius grows more ambitious in his smiles. The Guilds murmur. The Temple watches. Somewhere under Red Mountain, a forgotten god sharpens memory into a blade.

And in the streets between all that—two knives I cannot ignore. The Morag Tong writes in ink you only see when it’s already dried. Their “honor” is a veil; their writs, a ledger where politics pay tithes to murder. Rise too quickly and someone purchases humility under your name. I’ve adjusted my routes: never the same roof-road twice in a ten-day; decoy errands that end in a market stall; dead drops marked with a broken circle (storm spent—change your path). I’ve started buying the spaces between their rituals—the shrine sweepers, the paper-runners, the clerk who files what no one should read. If a writ ever carries my name, I intend to read it before the assassin does.

Then there’s the Camonna Tong—legal blades with illegal appetites, a Dunmer pride curdled into trade-tax and blood. If Hlaalu is to flourish and the Empire’s coffers keep their rhythm, that dagger must point outward, not inward. So I’ve set hooks: a scribe in their counting room who thinks his new debt is a kindness; a ferryman who moves their packages and mine and cannot remember which is which; two captains who now prefer Hlaalu coin to Redoran gratitude. The plan is simple and patient: starve the parts that refuse a leash, feed the ones that learn the house’s hand. Bring the Tong under ledger before it comes under pyre.

Velath Morain helps. A home, yes, but more: a vantage, a hinge, the place where my work stops being someone else’s errand and becomes my own design. From its walls I can hear the province answer—doors opening before I knock, shadows leaning where I need them. The cats read my feather marks and the merchants learn my silences. If I keep the Tong quiet and the Tong fed—both of them—the Empire sleeps easier and Hlaalu breathes deeper. Stability is a quieter word for power.

I’ve risen. I haven’t escaped. The land has begun to answer me—I feel it in the way the Odai talks to stone when I plan, in the way a watch turns late when I need it to. Now I must decide what I will ask of this province when it finally answers. And what I will owe it when it does.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Lord of the Odai Plateau • Captain of Thieves
Spy of the Empire • Steward of Velath Morain
Heir of Secrets

Chapter Text

Chapter 6 – Mortar and Brass
Sixth Entry – 17th of Mid Year, 3E 427
Location: Odai Plateau, Velath Morain

“A noble builds a legacy with stone and silver. A king builds it with silence and secrets.”

Velath Morain Wakes

I woke to hammer-song and river-breath. Dawn rolled a grey shawl over the Odai Plateau, and the half-built keep answered like a body learning its bones. Canvas walls snapped. Ropes sang through pulley wheels. Someone cursed in Dunmeris and someone else laughed like they’d been paid twice. The air tasted of wet stone, lime dust, and nettle tea steeping too long on a brazier.

I sleep on a pallet in the future map room—four walls and a roof if you’re generous, three if you count the places the wind still gets a vote. From my doorway I could see the whole throat of the place: stone ribs propped on scaffolds, tower stumps wearing netch-moss, and a temporary cat’s road chalked across beams that will be halls someday. Under it all, the Odai talked to the cliff and the cliff hissed back. Not a fortress—yet. But it answers when I speak.

Knife traded for ledger, poison for parchment. I make my rounds with a stick of chalk behind my ear and a pouch that rattles like decisions.

• Signals: I walked the inside path first, refreshing marks while the crews stretched. Feather on the postern (sky clear); tilted square by the main gate (no steel drawn inside); shallow spiral behind the cistern (meet at moonrise). Two fine verticals on the inner stair—watch loop breaks here—because the watch will exist once I’ve finished inventing it.
  
  
• People: Kitchen smoke already up; the cook listens more than he seasons. The healer’s corner smells of salve and secrets. Six sellswords eat like men who intend to earn it. Three cats out of South Wall sweep the dead drops and check the roof roads—one tile squeaked last night; we’ll lift it or teach it manners.
  
  
• Papers: A slate in the courtyard held three columns: stone, hands, coin. I shifted names down a rung here, up a rung there, and signed off on a carpenters’ petition for thicker planks on the western hoist (they weren’t wrong).
  
  

By the time the tea gave up its last bitterness, the keep had stopped being an idea and started being work. A place of power is mostly place until you teach it the power part: who may come, which doors admit which lies, where the floorboards never squeak, and how the shadows fall when you want them to.

I had just set my seal on a “drainage improvement” that looks like a sally port to anyone who can read blueprints in the dark when boots scuffed the threshold. Ash on the soles. News in the stance.

The Egg Mine Discovery

“My lord,” my steward said—breathing like he’d raced a gull—“the southern ridge… rockfall opened a throat. There’s a kwama smell.”

We went at once, down the goat-track behind the scaffolds where the river gnaws. The new hole breathed damp and old. I sent a cat ahead with a lamp low-hooded and followed, one hand on the chalk, one on the wall, feeling for places where the stone remembers to be safe.

Inside, the world became arras and heartbeat. Chambers stitched together by the patient labor of insects that don’t write letters. The air was warm enough to soften wax. I laid cant as I went, because even in a found place the Guild has to teach the future how to behave: a chalk fishhook where the passage necked down ( good fence in the making ), three small verticals on a crumbly shelf ( watch turns here—in future ), a broken circle near an iffy span ( storm spent; change your route ).

We found her in the second bell of walking: the queen. A domed empire of pale muscle, trembling delicately in the lamplight the way a chest does when it decides to keep breathing. Scribs ticked along her flanks like clever thoughts. A pair of warrior drones met us at the edge—posture big, minds small, trainable. I slowed my breath and let the room hear it. The drones decided we were weather, not wolves.

“Abandoned?” I asked, voice low. The steward nodded. “No claims current. Last permit’s a decade old—House wars shook this district; no one came back to count the clusters.”

I knelt by a shelf of eggs stacked like coin waiting for the right purse. Opportunity tends to look like work until it has a ledger.

“Ventilation?” I asked.

“Natural chimneys, two,” he said. “One clogged, one singing. Bracing’s gone to rot in three galleries. Easy to shore if you want it.”

“I want it,” I said, and the mine seemed to exhale in agreement.

We walked the galleries like men counting pains: collapses here, a drowned pocket there, a perfect chute where baskets will travel sweet as rumor. I marked where a watch post should be, where a shrine to keep superstitions honest would sit well, and where the pay chest would be most annoying to steal without being fun to try.

Back in daylight, I set the first gears turning. Runners to Gnisis and Caldera to sniff for idle miners and honest liars; a note for House clerks to “revisit a historical resource allocation” (filed under boring, approved under faster than a sword); a quiet word to the ferryman—two taps under the second pier for safe launch ; three for stand down ; a long drag of the pole on stone to mean eyes on the bluff .

By dusk I had two crews clearing the fallen face, a cat tallying timbers for shoring, and a priest who drinks quietly ready to bless whatever needed blessing to keep the men steady. The queen hummed under the hill like a promise. The keep rose a handspan while I was underground, and when I put my palm on the new-set stone it felt cool, like Nocturnal had pressed her cheek there for a breath. Out over the water, a first bright prickle came where the sky keeps its best single star. Azura is punctual when she means to be seen.

Ledger closed, chalk pocketed, knife where it always lives. The keep rises. And beneath it, a fiefdom forms.

The Miner Shortage… and a Solution in Gnisis

The rumor didn’t come in a letter; it came on cats’ breath. South Wall runners started calling picks “sleepy”—their way of saying the picks had no hands behind them. Dock talk in Hla Oad said egg prices would rise “if the coast keeps coughing.” A ledger in Balmora showed steady demand and a dip in supply; a second ledger—the one we keep under the first—showed three foremen buying more sujamma than sense. I pulled the thread.

Court-cant confirmed it. A House clerk murmured that “regional extraction capacity is constrained” (no miners), and a factor in Caldera, properly rested —two cups of sleep set in front of him—confided that Gnisis had men idled by tremors. I carried the news to the Council wrapped in phrases they enjoy: “reallocation of idle labor,” “stabilizing a strategic export,” and “House stewardship.” The room purred the way rooms do when a proposal sounds like profit and virtue at the same time. Stamps fell. Seals kissed parchment. I left with authority and a folded smile.

The road north taught my boots new vowels. From Velath Morain I took the silt strider at Balmora—up the swaying ladder, into a howdah that smells of old chitin, warm resin, and a wet-hay sweetness the drivers stop noticing. The giant’s legs thunked a slow arithmetic through the West Gash, each step lifting us over heathered ridges and into pockets of mushroom shadow where the wind forgets its job. We changed beasts at Ald’ruhn under the crab-shell bones of an ancient emperor of the sea, then swung west toward Gnisis across broken plateaus, canyon tongues, and stone that looks like it remembers fire personally.

First sight of Gnisis: a river ribbon bright as a blade wobbling past ash-brown huts that cling to a slope like barnacles; rope bridges listing between ledges; Redoran banners stiff in the canyon draft; and above it all, Fort Darius hunched like a mailed fist on a basalt knuckle. The earth shivered underfoot—small, mean tremors that make kwama skittish and men pretend they didn’t feel anything. Drums from the temple tried to flatten the fear; the beat wobbled when the ground did.

The hetman received me on a porch that had learned to creak along with the quakes. A practical man—calluses clean, ledger dirty, eyes like a shop door that never quite closes.

“Your mine is shut,” I said, plain.

“Our luck is, too,” he answered, plainer. “When the ground breathes, the kwama panic. Workers idle. Purses thin. Tempers fat.”

“I can settle the breathing,” I offered. “I’ll want your idle hands for Velath Morain—fair wage, salt up front, and transport. Volunteers, not chattel. You keep your dignity; I get my mine.”

He worked the words around like a man testing a tooth. “Solve the tremors. We’ll talk sign-on lists before the ink dries.”

We shook—House style, then town style—because both would be needed. In the corner shade, Redoran spears tilted enough to watch, not enough to interfere. Discipline in the posture; disapproval in the jaw. I left a broken circle in glass-scratch near the tavern lintel—storm brewing; don’t re-use this door—so my cats would vary their routes, and took my leave before the fort decided I needed questions.

The mountain’s heartbeat was always a Dwemer song if you listened right. I heard it in the pause between tremors and went looking for the source.

Into Bethamez: Machines Beneath the Mountain

The tremors spoke Dwemer, and in Gnisis there’s one mer who still answers when old brass calls. The pawnbroker swore he’d heard gears in the stone on still nights; the temple drummer admitted the beat falls out of time when the ground hums; a Redoran spear said a “wizard in the bug-shell” listens with his fingers and tells the mine when to breathe. Three rumors, one name: Baladas Demnevanni.

Finding Arvs-Drelen was a matter of walking where the town’s eyes didn’t—up past the kwama pens to the scar of an old shell, a Telvanni tower grown sideways into rock, all spirals and stubbornness. The door had opinions—a sigil that tested warmth, a latch that disliked impatience. I announced myself in court-cant, scrubbed into Telvanni courtesy: “Seeker for discourse and brief interruption,” palms open, steel sleeping. The latch stayed rude. So I tried the other language I speak: a single knock on the inhale, stand one pace left of center, wait seven heartbeats. The chitin shutter above me blinked. Something behind the wood decided I wasn’t a total mistake.

Inside, traps argued with visitors. A chitin dart-whisperer put a neat hole in the air where my ribs had been a breath earlier. A bonewalker unfolded out of a shadow like an unpaid bill; I paid in Calm and precise silence, laid two fingers to its brow, and gave it a minute it didn’t know it owned. A float lantern drifted across a stair; I timed my climb to its slow patrol and let the steps forget I was on them.

Baladas waited in a high room that smelled of old ink and hot metal. He took me in the way a jeweler weighs flaw—no greeting wasted, no word unearned. I said “tremors.” He pressed his fingers to the wall and listened the way healers listen to lungs. He closed his eyes, frowned at a rhythm I couldn’t hear, then pointed north-by-west without ceremony.

“Bethamez,” he said, as if the name were an address and a verdict. “Regulators old as the quarrel itself. One engine destabilized. Fix it, or your miners will drink themselves to death waiting.” He scratched a map in ash on a slate: three vents, two bypass gates, one valve to fear. “Break the second,” he added, “and the hill screams.”

Payment, I asked. He looked past me at a shelf of brass nonsense and said, “Silence,” which is Telvanni for don’t bring me back a committee. I agreed.

Bethamez opened like a clock whose maker is dead. The entrance throat breathed warm; vents sighed their tired arithmetic. I ghosted past spheres and spiders, reading pressure plates in dust-shine and patrol routes in the oil halos left by brass feet. Illusion bled the corners of their vision; Chameleon softened my outline where the light insisted. I used my picks like a priest uses a prayer—confidently, humbly, often—and left cant for my return: a tiny feather by a safe alcove (breathe here), two scratches where a bridge lies (step only on the dark bolts), a broken circle near a side door (storm spent; change your path).

Deeper in, the engine revealed itself: a lung of pipes singing heat, governor wheels ticking off mistakes, a power core pulsing like a heart that hasn’t learned how to stop. I bled pressure in the order Baladas sketched—bypass, bleed, brace—jammed a whining gear with a kwama chitin wedge, and counted the hiss between valve turns like beats in an Arena bout. The core came free with a sulk and a sigh; the tremor stuttered, then listened.

On the way out I let a sphere walk past my cheek close enough to smell old oil and refused the urge to breathe like a man underwater. Two more doors remembered the Skeleton Key when it reminded them. In a side workshop, a sealed cabinet held its breath as I passed—ink and vellum, the whisper of impossible diagrams—but that was a different hunger, for a different day.

I brought the core to Arvs-Drelen wrapped in netch-leather. Baladas took it like a midwife takes a child that cried on time. “You have the hands for old arguments,” he said, which might be Telvanni for thank you or don’t get in my way again . He scrawled a note for the hetman that would calm a town and unsettle a rival scholar, and then he forgot I existed, which is the cleanest dismissal a wizard can give.

By dusk the ground in Gnisis had decided to be still. Drums found their beat. The hetman found his pen. And when the men with idle hands lined up for my steward’s salt and wages, I thought of Baladas’ map, the engine’s sigh, and how many kinds of language a province makes you learn before it admits you’re trying to speak it true.

The Machine Room… and the Airship

On the way out I found a door that hadn’t learned how to be looted—sealed, stubborn, perfect. My lockpick made easy work of it; the lock gave up like a held breath. Inside, a workshop caught mid-thought: tool racks in militant rows, gauges asleep with their needles at attention, trays of stamped glyph-plates sorted by a mind that loved order more than company. The air tasted of hot brass and old ink.

On the highest shelf lay folios crisp enough to cut. I opened one and the room narrowed to lines and ratios—lift calculations, pressure tolerances, bracing schemes that folded a storm into obedience. Hull plates rendered like syllables, a keel sketched as a sentence that would only make sense once spoken aloud against the sky.

Flight. Not rumor. Geometry.

For a long minute I didn’t move. If Vivec knew of this, the cantons would cast shadows on clouds. If the Temple had it, the Ghostfence would hum to a different, higher note. This was not a House secret; this was a provincial shift. A thief knows the weight of what he steals before he lifts it. This weighed more than gold. It weighed like future.

I wrapped the folios in oilcloth, slid a thin brass plate between two pages to keep their place like a blade in a book, and bound the bundle flat under my sleeve with mason’s twine. To anyone’s eye it was only a forearm wrapped against a sprain. I made a decoy packet—scrap vellum, meaningless drafts—and tucked it where a cursory search might be satisfied. On the cabinet’s underside I scratched a tiny star in cant (roof road clean—for now), then rubbed it nearly smooth. If I had to come back, I would know where I had already been brave.

Baladas met me where the ruin remembers the sky. I gave him the power core with both hands and a bow that said ally more than supplicant . He took it like a blessing he didn’t trust, eyes already back on a diagram only he could see. He sent me away with a lecture disguised as thanks—about pressure, patience, and how men die when they don’t respect either.

The airship came with me.

All the way to the surface, ink and brass filings pressed my skin, warming to my pulse as if the idea had learned my rhythm. On the ridge above Gnisis the wind made a shape that could have been a wing if the mountain had remembered how. I do not know if I will ever see it fly. But I know this: if Secret Ascent is to be more than stone, it must have sky. Somewhere in those folios is a promise I have no right to and every reason to keep.

That night by lamplight I copied a single page from memory—the curvature of the gas bladder, the spine that refuses to twist—into a mason’s ledger labeled lime deliveries, then stitched the folios into the lining of my travel cloak with thread the color of old blood. If anyone else owns this knowledge, they hide it well. Until the day a keel writes its first sentence over the Odai, the secret is mine to keep and mine to try.

My Return to the Surface

The mountain went quiet. Kwama settled. The hetman kept his word. A line of miners followed me south, picks slung like spears, voices low in the old work-song that keeps pace better than a drum. I left cant along the route for my runners—feather on a milestone (road clear), chevrons at the ford (ferryman good), and a tiny star at a side trail (roof road to the ridgeline; use in rain).

We crested the Odai to find Velath Morain a storey taller—scaffolds in neat ribs, banners drying on lines, the keep’s profile starting to believe in itself.

Burbul gro-Rush was already there, broad as a kiln door, chalk on his knuckles and a plumb bob swinging from his belt. He counted heads like a quartermaster, not an artist—you, stone; you, timber; you, spoil and cart—then laid out bunks before the dust left their boots. “Found you some hands; now I need them,” he grunted, and the sentence became a plan.

He walked the walls with me at a builder’s pace—slow, listening. He thumped the masonry with a mason’s mallet and cocked his head to hear the hollows answer. “Your cliff’s a liar,” he said, tapping a stretch where sea-mist eats lime faster than pride. “We underpin, or one day your ballroom goes swimming.”

What followed was underpinning done like prayer. Burbul chalked datum lines and snapped cord from tower to tower. He cut pockets under the old footings and packed them with ash-crete—basalt aggregate seasoned with saltrice ash, cured under sailcloth tents so the sea couldn’t steal the set. He stitched the cliff face with iron dogbones and gabion baskets stuffed with broken rock, then drilled weep holes—drainage teeth, he called them—so storm water could leave without taking the wall with it.

The miners took to him. He spoke their language: slope, span, bite. He split them into crews—stone, timber, spoil, vent. Stone crew dry-set basalt headers and stretchers into a new retaining curtain; timber crew raised truss for a high hall that breathed without wheezing; spoil crew carved a sally-shaft that dropped to a ledge where the Odai gnaws hardest. Vent crew punched shafts through to the egg mine and lined them with chitin hoops so the queen would not take offense at the new winds.

Inside, Burbul drew the keep I had carried in my head since the deed warmed my palm. “You wanted quiet bravado,” he said. “So we hide it in the bones.” He sketched with charcoal: a gallery that carries whispers away from doors that matter; stairwells that turn left for right-handed swordsmen (and widen if you know which stone to step on); a postern that looks like part of the buttress until the buttress remembers it is a door. He set a false pantry on the kitchen’s cold wall; behind sacks of saltrice, a hinge that knows only night-hands. He insisted on murder slots disguised as rain slits above the gate—“Ugly work made beautiful by not being seen,” he said—then showed me how to oil them so they never announce themselves.

He had opinions about drains (“Drains are loyalties; neglect one and the rest betray you”) and about ornament (“Put your glory in the joinery, not the plaster; plaster lies”). He ordered netch-leather expansion joints along the gallery roof—“Stone is honest about moving; let it move and it won’t leave you”—and a sluice hidden behind mill boards to bleed floodwater when the Odai remembers it’s a river and not a servant.

We laced the work with cant as we went: feather marks scribed into the new postern lintel (sky clear unless rubbed out); a tilted square mortared low by the main gate (no steel drawn inside); a shallow spiral set behind the cistern (meet at moonrise); two fine verticals cut into the second tread of the east stair (watch loop breaks here). Burbul pretended not to see, and then, without looking at me, added a broken circle with his own thumbnail on the west buttress. “Storm spent,” he muttered. “Change your route.”

By day three the egg mine was braced, cleaned, blessed (by a priest who drinks quietly), and open. Vent shafts carried fresh air, and the queen clicked her approval—or at least, did not object. Burbul tied the last spine beam in the hall with a keel-stone—a slab he swore would keep the place talking straight in a high wind—then tapped it once with the mallet and listened like a father at a cradle.

For the first time, the ledgers bled black instead of red. Coin in; coin stacked; coin sent running to make more coin. We signed three short contracts—one with a Balmora factor for egg shipments, one with a tanner for netch leather, one with a bargeman who knows how not to be seen in daylight—and built their escape clauses into our smiles. My steward left a single feather on my desk, point toward the window—sky clear, Master—and underneath it a neat column of figures that finally added up to breathing room.

At dusk, when the fog lifted and the sea showed its knives, Burbul stood beside me on the roof road and squinted into wind. “We’ll put a parapet ear here,” he said, setting his big hand where my shoulder had already imagined it. “So you can listen to enemies before they know they’re speaking.”

Nocturnal cooled the mortar under my palm. Azura hung low—one stubborn star pinned to the bruise of evening. Between them, Velath Morain stopped being a plan and started being a place.

Reflection: The Value of Dirt

Foundation is no longer metaphor. It is stone, egg, and steam. I have architects building me rooms; miners digging me wealth; and secrets even the Tribunal hasn’t bothered to forbid yet.

I am done merely infiltrating Morrowind’s power; I am establishing it. A house within a House. A keep whose walls speak cant to those I trust and stone to those I don’t. Velath Morain is a vantage, a hinge, a place where errands end and designs begin.

And yet—the dream still stalks. The golden mask walks among the dead, delighted as if at a feast. The Sixth House hums under silk. Caius writes fewer words with heavier ink. Crassius smiles like a man measuring curtains. The Temple counts my footsteps on roads it doesn’t patrol.

The land answers me. I can feel it in how shadows favor my roads and how doors decide to open. But everything given here is an advance, not a gift. I rise. To what? And for whom?

Soon I will return to Caius. I suspect he already knows the cost I’m silently agreeing to. If he doesn’t, Azura does. Nocturnal will make sure I step as softly as a king who remembers he began as a thief.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Lord of the Odai Plateau
Architect of Prosperity
Thief of Airships
Spy in the House of Ash

Chapter Text

Chapter 7 – The Scholar, the Duelist, and the Dream
Seventh Entry – 3rd of Sun’s Height, 3E 427
Location: Velath Morain; Ald’ruhn; Sadrith Mora; Vivec City

“Knowledge is a blade with no hilt. If you cannot master it, you will bleed for your curiosity.”

This day marked the first of six months on Vvardenfell counted not by calendars but by ink, blood, and whispers in sand. With that brass-laced miracle stitched beneath my cloak—the airship folios warm to my pulse—I turned from plunder to study, from coin to calculus. The choice remade my map: scholars became allies, secrets became tools, and those who stood between me and knowledge learned how quickly a lesson can bleed.

Edwinna Elbert and the Dwemer-Blooded Mind

Ald’ruhn breathes dust and stubbornness; in its bones, fire still moves. I left Balmora at dawn by silt strider, the great beast ticking like a ship’s hull as it negotiated the foyadas. West Gash unrolled in bands—saltbush, stone, wind—and every mile farther from the Odai felt like I was walking into an older argument. Redoran spears dotted the ridgelines; ash squalls came and went like temper. By noon the city rose ahead, hunched beneath the ribbed carapace of the dead emperor crab they call Skar—a town built under a trophy so no one forgets who does the hunting here.

I kept to the lee of Skar’s shadow, reading the place the way cats read a ledger: a chalk notch on a water barrel (no questions inside), a feather scratched low on a lintel (roof road clean), three tiny verticals by the ratway grate (watch loop breaks here). Redoran cant runs drier than Balmora’s, but a mark is a mark. I made a quiet stop at Rat in the Pot—warm ale, colder stares—then crossed to the Mages Guild, where I was meant to be a patron with questions rather than a knife with answers.

Edwinna Elbert was exactly where rumor swears she always is: amid a siege of journals, brass joints, and half-repaired animunculi. Her words ran hot as steam and straight as pipework—no ornament, all pressure. I set a sealed folio on her bench, broke the twine, and unfolded a single plate. When she saw the airship plans, the steam in her stilled. Fingers that hadn’t trembled in decades traced ratios and rivet lines. Awe humbled a wizard. Rare. Useful.

We fenced politely in court-cant.
She: “Scholarly curiosity from a Hlaalu… donor?” (translation: are you buying secrets or trouble).
I: “Endowing clarity, not chaos.” (translation: I’ll pay in coin and discretion; I prefer both).

We struck a pact: I would bring her what the Dwemer left locked, and she would help me read what they never bothered to hide. In return, she’d “facilitate reciprocal research privileges”—Guild talk for opening a door. She walked me downstairs to the Guild Guide—a circle graven into the flagstones, humming faint as a bottle’s lip. “Ald’ruhn, Balmora, Caldera, Vivec, Sadrith Mora,” she said, tapping each name like a metronome. “You’ve services rendered and an account in good standing. Present this chit; speak the destination; arrive alive.” Another kind of road, bought with ink instead of blood.

I paid my dues—both kinds. A legal donation for the ledger. A “consideration” for the guide on duty so my comings and goings would always be “just missed” when someone asked. Then I laced a small promise into the room: a cant feather scratched beneath Edwinna’s worktable— wing clear; sky safe —so any of my cats slipping through later would know which drawers to lift and which to leave sleeping.

By night, under Skar’s shell, the wind rattled the bone struts like a dry drum. I lay on a cot too short for ambition and reread lift equations until the numbers blurred to birds. Nocturnal cooled the ash in my lungs; on the horizon, a single star lingered at the windbreak’s edge like a reminder to keep my eye beyond the next problem. Come morning, I stepped into the Guild circle, felt the world take a breath, and learned how an island can be crossed in the span of a heartbeat. Another resource. Another door. Another way to be where I am needed before anyone knows where I was.

The Potion in Sadrith Mora

Edwinna’s first ask looked simple in ink: Detect Creature, two vials—useful in ruins where guardians still pace. Simple, except Sadrith Mora is Telvanni to the marrow, and their courtesies are knives with pleasanter hilts.

I took the Ald’ruhn Guild circle at midmorning—stone hum, breath held, then the tilt of arrival—and stepped out into Wolverine Hall, the Empire’s square-edged pocket sewn into a robe that refuses stitches. The Guild Guide stamped my chit and pretended not to notice I paid her a little extra to keep my comings “just missed” if anyone asked.

Outside, the city breathed spores and suspicion. Tel Naga rose like a thought no one could finish—fungal tower, living windows, roots braided with slaves’ chains and hirelings’ boredom. Telvanni retainers drifted past in silk that whispered lawsuits; their mouths smiled, their eyes audited.

I did what I always do in a new town: read the stones before the faces. Sadrith’s reef-cant is scratched into mushroom bark and pier pilings—salt plays havoc with chalk, so cats cut shallow and rub fish oil into the marks.

• A small tilted square on a mooring post: no steel inside (applies to this pier only; the next one eats you).
  
  
• Two nested chevrons carved high on a stair riser: ferryman good for one more run.
  
  
• A neat feather low on a door jamb: sky clear—and in Telvanni land, that also means don’t linger; the sky listens.
  
  

I introduced myself where it mattered. Dirty Muriel’s Cornerclub sits under Wolverine Hall’s bones; laughter sticks to the rafters and information to the bottoms of cups. Big Helende—Khajiit, all velvet and receipts—runs the local chapter. She weighed my name like coin and flicked her ear toward a back table.

“Balmora cat,” she purred, “court voice, alley hands. We like both. You leave a mark when you pass; we’ll leave a purse when you need it.”

We traded countersigns and calendars. I scratched a feather under the corner of her table ( wing clean; sky clear ) and she tapped back once with a claw ( speak later ). A runner of hers—lanky Bosmer called Nirasa—sold me a map of which alleys the Mouths of Telvanni councilors “forget” to protect and which ones they remember too hard. I paid in silver and a patrol schedule lifted from a Legion bulletin in Ald’ruhn—small gifts that make larger doors polite.

Business next. The Mages Guild here answers to Skink-in-Tree’s-Shade—an Argonian whose quill writes faster than most men think. His office smelled of marsh books and clean glass. I asked for Detect Creature the way a serious patron asks for a respectable poison: softly, confidently, with exact coin.

“Two vials,” he said, watching my eyes instead of my purse. “You look like someone who needs them to find what prefers not to be found.”

“Ruins,” I said. “And answers.”

His mouth flicked—Argonian for a smile. “Ruins sell cheap. Answers don’t.” He produced two clear vials the color of good ice, then leaned in with a scholar’s curiosity. “If your work is Dwemer,” he added, “bring me what breathes brass. I pay in knowledge or in gold. You look like a man who spends both.”

On my way out I laid glass-scratch on the Guild’s back step—two nested chevrons for my cats: ferryman good; one more run —and another mark behind a rain barrel near Dirty Muriel’s: broken circle ( storm brewing; change the route )—Telvanni eyes were getting curious.

I took a circuit I wouldn’t have chosen if I were alone—around Sadri Manor, under Neloth’s balconies, through a market where slaves’ wrists weighed the price of mushrooms—and let myself be seen as a merchant’s factor more than a thief’s captain. Court-cant to the stallholders, alley-cant to the lads carrying crates, silence to the doors that listen. When the hour turned, I stepped back into the Guild circle, spoke Ald’ruhn—felt the world tilt again—and carried Edwinna’s vials into Skar’s shade before the Telvanni realized how much I’d learned without asking a single question.

Contacts made. Marks left. Potions in hand. Another city added to the map of places that think they know me.

Chimarvamidium: Words Forged in Steam

Only a couple hours had passed since my arrival in Sadrith Mora, and by noon I took the Ald’ruhn circle home, the stone’s hum threading my bones. I stepped out beneath Skar’s shadow with the desert still in my ears. Edwinna’s lab was half library, half battlefield—glassware bivouacked between stacks of notes, a dwarven spider splayed on a cloth like an autopsy that refused to end.

I set two vials of Detect Creature on her bench. “Cold-kept,” I said. She held each up to the light, pupils tightening, then nodded once—approval that spends like coin.

“Good,” she murmured, and slid a second slip across the brass-chafed table. “Next: Chimarvamidium—Ancient Tales of the Dwemer, Vol. IV. Banned some places, burned in others. Bring me a clean copy if you can, a readable ruin if you must.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Vivec,” she said, already turning back to her spider. “Where the Temple hides what it can’t bless and the rest of us hide it better. Start at the Guild; end at the usual shop that sells what the law forgot to name.”

I tipped the Guild Guide and rode the next teleport to Vivec—that little lurch of the world, the breath that doesn’t know if it was taken or stolen—and arrived in the Foreign Quarter Guildhall, all polished stone and polite ink. Apprentices flowed around me like river water around a rock. I kept my edges smooth.

“Looking for a text,” I told the desk scribe in court-cant. “Antiquarian, Dwemer. Private circulation. ” The scribe’s eyes flicked to a back shelf, then to me, then down to a chit he stamped without stamping. “We don’t carry heresies,” he said aloud. His quill scratched an address that wasn’t an address. “But bookstores do.”

Outside, the Foreign Quarter was a ledger of noise—fishmongers lifting prices with their voices, sailors lowering them with their hands. I read the cant before I read the signs: a chalk fishhook on a stall’s back leg ( fence drinks fair ), a sideways V above a clothier’s lintel ( no steel drawn inside ), a thumb-smudge on velvet ( ask behind the drape ). They all pointed, as such things do, to Jobasha’s Rare Books—lower waistworks, door that sticks if you aren’t invited.

Jobasha’s stoop creaked a welcome it didn’t give strangers. “You bring coin and discretion,” he said without looking up. “And you don’t ask for anything by its right name.”

“An old travel guide,” I said, laying two stacks of septims like punctuation. “Fourth in the series. Lots of… moving parts.”

He smiled with his eyes. From a safe that pretended to be a cupboard, he drew a volume bound in false piety—spine borrowed from a Temple sermon, true title pressed shallow under the leather like a secret that enjoys being one. Chimarvamidium.

I eased the first pages open and read a few lines by lantern in a rented cell while the canton muttered beyond the shutters—tales of animunculi waking at orders whispered in metal grammar, of centurions pretending sleep like faithful hounds at a bad door. Some stories felt… recent. I left a broken circle on the jamb ( storm brewing; avoid this door soon ) for the next cat who likes to read in peace, then wrapped the book in oilcloth and took the Guild stairs two at a time.

Back through the circle to Ald’ruhn—tilt, hum, dust—and into Edwinna’s lab before the ink dried on her notes. She didn’t say thank you; wizards rarely waste words on coins already paid. She did, however, hold her breath over the first plate engraving, which is better than thanks.

“Good work,” she said finally, voice steady, hands not. “Take the western tower chit. You may use our circle when you need it— professionally. ” A door opened that wasn’t a door yesterday. I inclined my head as if I hadn’t planned for exactly this.

Deal done, I rode the line home—to Balmora, where ledgers sleep easier and knives do not. It was a quick walk south of town before I saw the half finished peaks of Veloth Morain before me. I logged the day in two ledgers (one honest, one useful), left a feather mark on the postern ( sky clear ), and set Chimarvamidium on my desk. The brass on the folio’s edge warmed to my palm. Somewhere, in a ruin that thinks in pipes, a machine turned its head.

Redoran Incursion and a Blade in the Dark

A wax seal waited on my desk at Velath Morain—Crassius Curio’s grin pressed in red. The note itself was the theater he prefers: a compliment that bowed twice, a map that said nothing, and a single sentence that said everything.

Banden Indarys has raised a stronghold too near our border. Resolve it.

“Resolve” in Hlaalu means be effective and leave me deniability. I stared at the seal until the candle guttered and told myself a truth I’d been rehearsing since Cyrodiil: I am no stranger to murder—but this would be my first for someone else’s coin, in the House’s voice, not my own. If I meant to keep my cover and keep climbing, the answer had been prewritten long ago.

I set the keep in motion. Two cats ran alibis the way other men run errands: one left a clean feather at South Wall (sky clear) and bought drinks loudly in my name; the other moved through Hlaalu Canton murmuring that I was meeting with a salt-factor about Odai tariffs. My steward inked a line in the ledger—drainage survey, Odai south bank—then left the book open on my desk where any guest would “accidentally” see it. Schedules make innocence.

I scouted Indarys Manor in rain—the kind that sands footprints off the world. From the smokehouse I counted patrol loops and the breath between hound barks. I mapped a roof road: smokehouse to dovecote to main hall—two slate tiles that don’t squeak, then a cracked one, then the gutter. A bell rope hung beside the north watch. I lifted the clapper with two fingers and snipped the line where the cut would hide inside the braid. On the eastern eave I chalked a feather (sky clear) for a second who never needed to come.

The house had told me its habits by midnight. I let the storm drape me and went in on the exhale, as Caius taught me. A servant’s door that had forgotten to complain. Ghost-powder on the bottom of the kitchen door to show any trip-threads; none. A hall rug that hid the noisiest board—step on the fringe, not the field. I bled a whisper of Chameleon into the air, a tincture of Calm where a sentry’s shadow paused at the stair. A latch that liked oil and remembered me as a friend.

Nocturnal drew my cloak tight; Azura pinned a single star in a skylight and kept the thunder talking just loud enough. In the bedchamber, Banden Indarys slept on his confidence. Redoran noble: honor like armor, honor like a pillow. The knife was a sentence written carefully between two others, so only the right eyes could read it. Under the ear, forward and down—geometry, not rage. No struggle. No time for prayer. He never woke.

I tidied the lie. Wiped the hilt with the edge of his bedding so the guard who found him would swear he’d gripped for help and found nothing. Turned the window latch inward, left a bare smear of mud on the sill (a smuggler’s signature, not an assassin’s). Moved a ledger in his study one inch askew and left a damp circle from a bottle he didn’t drink—a debt arriving late. In the pantry, I wedged a loose cork behind a cask tap so it would weep slowly by morning: the kind of small leak that becomes a better story than the truth.

On my way out, the hounds stirred. I blew a dusting of sujamma-laced soporific into the gap under the kennel door and listened to them surrender to a dream of rabbits they would never catch. In the stairwell a guard’s silhouette broke rhythm—spear butt striking stone. I slid into the angle of wall and shadow, laid a phantom footstep two landings below with a minor Illusion, and watched him chase a sound that wasn’t there.

The manor learned silence. The border learned manners. I set a tiny star behind the headboard (cat-road: don’t come this way again) and stepped back into the rain that had been keeping my secret the whole time.

At dawn, a South Wall runner set a broken circle on my postern (storm spent—change your route) and three words on my desk: “Vivec pleased. Drink.” Curio’s reply came later: a single obsidian token enclosed, his way of saying he’d heard the message I’d written without ink. He didn’t praise; he advanced the conversation—more errands, more rooms I could now enter without being announced.

I washed my hands in cold water until the skin bit. The first kill for House coin sits differently in the bones. Not heavier—just… louder, at night, when the ledger closes and the room forgets to breathe. I let the keep’s stones take some of it; they are learning what kind of lord I am.

In the morning, the rumors Curio wanted were already walking: smuggler grudge, debt come due, envy in the Redoran ranks. No one said Hlaalu. No one said my name. That is the work. That is the cost.

I put the token in a drawer that does not show up on inventories, buckled my harness, and sent a message to my cats: no repeats on the roof road for a ten-day, decoys along the Odai, ferryman on two-tap only. Then I stood at the parapet and watched rain lift off the river in veils, wondering which title I had just grown into—and which I had just outgrown.

Dram Bero’s Champion

Curio’s courier arrived before the rain finished rinsing Indarys from my boots: a strip of velvet with his seal and three words— “Come to me.”
Velath Morain doesn’t yet wear a circle of its own, so I rode down to Balmora under a low ceiling of cloud, left my mount at the South Wall’s back post, and climbed the Mages Guild stairs two at a time. The Guild Guide stood inside her chalk-ring like a rumor ready to be true. I paid in coin and courtesy; she answered in light. The jump felt as it always does—stomach left behind with the last sentence, feet arriving before the thought that sent them.

Vivec’s Guild opened around me in the Foreign Quarter Plaza—ozone, lamp smoke, the soft complaint of robes in a hurry. I crossed the bridges toward Hlaalu Canton at Azura’s hour, when the city agrees, briefly, to speak softly. A stair that doesn’t appear on maps remembered me; a doorkeeper who pretends not to see what he isn’t paid to see nodded me through.

Crassius wore satisfaction like perfume. “ Decisive, ” he purred, “ and noble. ” He meant useful . He waved away wine and drew me toward the window, where the canton’s edge cut the dusk into order. “You have my full support,” he said. “But my support has a roof. If you want an introduction to the Duke, you’ll need other ceilings over your head. One in particular.”

“Dram Bero,” I said, and watched his smile confirm it.

Bero is a figurative ghost with a real vote—Hlaalu councilor whose address changes by the season, whose business is catalogued in ledgers that never learned to be found. No one sees him; everyone feels the pressure where he has leaned. Artifacts move when he blinks. Houses rearrange themselves when he forgets to sigh.

“How do I see a rumor?” I asked.

“You don’t,” Curio said, delighted. “You let it see you. Quietly.” He pressed an obsidian token into my palm—twin to the one Bero’s household had once sent me as a reply. “Show this to the right absence.”

I left a feather mark under Curio’s lintel (sky clear, master) and went to find a man who lives in negative space. Thieves-cant did the mapwork that ink could not: a chalk fishhook at St. Olms’ lower stair (ferryman drinks fair), three fine verticals near a blind landing (watch turns on the hour), and—most telling—a smudge on plaster at shoulder height where hands had parted a hanging often. The plaza provides a hundred doors for those who like doors. Bero’s sits behind a tapestry, inside a tithe-closet, up a service stair that thinks it used to be a chimney.

Two knocks, a pause, one knock—Curio’s old rhythm. The panel sighed. A mer with accountant’s eyes measured the token, then me. I surrendered a knife I hadn’t used in three days and an attitude I had used that morning. He took one and not the other; we understood each other.

Bero’s rooms were bone and shadow—chairs with too many edges, a table that wanted to be an altar. He didn’t stand. He didn’t need to. “Support,” he said, as if totaling a column, “for a price simple enough to keep the story tidy.”

“Name it.”

“The Arena.”

Of course. Paperwork loves a public ending. “ Garding the Bold, ” he added, letting the name do the work of three paragraphs. Hlaalu’s long-standing champion. A Nord who had taught dust to bleed and crowds to sing. Bero’s lips almost found a smile. “Defeat him, and you can say you didn’t need my vote. Which will make it easier for me to give you my vote.”

We fenced in court-cant for the shape of the terms:

He: “A rising kinsman, eager to impress.” (Earn your reputation where witnesses keep good notes.)
I: “A humble cousin, eager to serve.” (I’ll climb loudly this once so you can pretend I didn’t.)
He: “No writs involved.” (The Tong doesn’t need to be asked its opinion.)
I: “Only honor.” (And deniability.)

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Let the city breakfast on it.”

I etched a feather behind a loose tile in his hall—sky clear for return—and came down into the canton’s stomach where the gambling dens breathe. Word outruns men in Vivec; by the time I reached the Foreign Quarter, odds on the bout had already learned my name and begun to price my death conservatively. I left a broken circle on a pillar (storm brewing; choose a different door) for my cats and slept badly in a rented cell above a tailor who measures lies as well as inseams.

Morning arrived with drums. The Arena wears sunlight like lacquer and blood like old news. In the waiting pen, Garding grinned through his scars. “You’re Crassius’s knife,” he said, pleased to have a story to tell himself. “I’m Hlaalu’s hammer.”

“Hammers break,” I said, and stretched.

But that is the next tale.

For now: Curio had given me his ceiling; Bero had shown me the sky hole I had to climb through to reach the Duke. I set a feather under the Arena’s south gate (sky clear— for me ), palmed a dull coin to a doorman whose eyes wanted to be honest, and stepped into a circle that makes truths loud.

Duel in the Arena of Blades

The Vivec Arena eats voices and returns thunder; it chews prayer into noise and spits it back as wagers. Across the circle stood Garding the Bold, a Nord whose scars had their own footnotes. His shield was a stanza of iron; his longsword, a line break with teeth. The crowd wanted entrails and poetry in that order.

The horn wrote the first syllable. He opened with a declarative sentence—shield high, sword low, a rushing couplet meant to pin the reader to the page. I let him have his first line and slid to the margin, changing his meter with a sidestep, enjambment in leather boots. My blade flicked the inside of his shield arm—just a kiss, enough ink to mark the rhythm. He grinned; good fighters enjoy being read.

We circled, trading metaphors. His style was an epic—broad themes, hammered cadence, boasts that knew their audience. Mine was a lyric under the breath—half-rhyme and suggestion, cuts that rhyme later when you realize what they meant. He tried a rhyme of shield-bash and heel-hook; I answered with a caesura—withdrawal so sharp the dust forgot to rise—then a couplet to his thigh and ribs. Steel rang. The crowd punctuated with its own rough chorus, commas of breath, exclamation of coin.

He changed meter first, as champions do when a poem won’t sit still—abandoned the wall for the tide, big arcs, shoulders like oars. I gave him sand and sun and shadow, made him row into absence. Twice the stanza opened for an ending—his throat a neat blank space—but Arena fights are politics as much as proof. You don’t close the book on the first good rhyme; you let the audience learn the refrain.

Garding tried to bind my blade the way a bad editor cages a good line. I let him have ink, not meaning—rolled the wrist, surrendered the hilt for a heartbeat, reclaimed it with a turn that wrote behind his guard. He answered with a headlong metaphor, a bash that tore a gasp from the seats and a bruise into my ribs—solid prose, ugly and honest. I gave him paradox: stepped into the second swing, inside the grammar of it, felt the wind of the stroke and not the bite, and left a neat italic along his collar where the pauldron forgets to pray.

We reached the volta—the turn every poem owes itself. His breath began to write longer lines; mine kept its short music. A feint became a thesis; the thesis became misdirection; his recovery was the final quatrain he didn’t know he was writing. I drew him across his own footprints, let his shield commit to a rhyme it couldn’t finish, and set my edge to the throat—just the weight of a closing quotation mark.

He held my eyes, found the period, and nodded once. A professional’s concession: the last true line in a field of loud punctuation. The stands erupted the way cities pretend to love you—because you just made their numbers honest. In the high seats, Dram Bero’s mouth discovered a smile the way an audit discovers zero: inevitable, quiet, definitive. Favor earned. Ledger updated.

Curio’s Curtain Call

I brought Curio the silence he’d commissioned—Banden Indarys resolved, borders obedient—and he received it the way a playwright receives a good second act: with pleased edits. His apartments smelled of warmed resin and decisions. He let my report unspool in court-cant and trimmed it with little noises that meant useful , clean , believable .

“Two councilors now,” he purred, tapping a fingernail to mark each: himself—silk glove over knife hand—and Dram Bero—the smile that only audits learn. “With those, we can risk a larger room.”

He leaned back, theatrical even in a whisper. “Duke Vedam Dren,” he said, savoring each consonant. “Once our House’s steward on Vvardenfell, now the Emperor’s voice on Ebonheart. Publicly un-Hlaalu; privately… a man who knows where his best investments were made.” His eyes weighed me as if I were a coin he meant to keep spending. “Give me a day or two. I’ll see you announced on the island—not as a petitioner, as a solution.”

He poured wine but watched my hands instead of the cup. “Remember: the Duke’s denial of House favors is part of the favor. We make his distance easy; he shortens it when it matters.”

I left a feather mark high on his lintel—sky clear, master—and another smaller one behind a screen only a cat would check— roof road clean for the return . He would have it erased before dawn; erasure is how men like Curio say yes .

Appointment at Ebonheart

From the Canton’s balconies I could see Ebonheart in the fading light—a fort on its rock, sails nodding like polite conspirators. Curio’s message runners would cross the water faster than any oath. I spent the evening moving through Hlaalu Canton’s quieter stairwells, letting my shadow be smaller than my voice. A day or two, he’d said. In that time, I would make sure every ledger that ever said Nuada Hlaalu could learn to say Duke’s guest without stuttering.

Back to Balmora

I took the teleportation circle from Vivec to Balmora—the sensation always half-fall, half-footstep, the world remembering you a heartbeat after you arrive. The Balmora Mages Guild was warm chalk dust and the faint singe of recent spells. I nodded to Masalinie—one finger to the brow, Guild-neutral—and stepped into the night streets.

The Odai muttered the same old arguments to its stones. I laid a skinny feather on South Wall’s back stair (sky clear; keep your name short) and refreshed two dead drops: a waxed tube behind the cellar beam for cats with letters they didn’t write, and a coin-weighted rag under the eave that tells a ferryman which pier to favor. Then I climbed the familiar steps to Caius Cosades, where brilliance lives under rags and skooma stink.

He opened the door before I knocked—old habit or old paranoia. “Boy,” he said, which is how he admits he’s glad you’re alive.

The Dismissal and the Dream

I put the neat bones of my trip on his table: Addhiranirr’s hunted trail, Huleeya’s older-than-Temple lines, Mehra Milo’s dissent dressed as devotion; routes through Vivec that breathe; which canals have ears; where the Census moth lost its wings. He listened with the patience of a man who makes maps from other people’s walking.

Then I tried to hand him the thing I hadn’t put to paper: the golden mask that walks my sleep like it owns the floor; the voice that laughs with corpses as if they’re wedding guests; the hunger that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I said “dreams,” and he moved it aside with a palm like pushing crumbs from a plate.

“Ash madness,” he said lightly. “Work strain. Sleep sober, not clever.” The edge of his mouth wanted a smile; the edge of his eyes wouldn’t let it. He had parchment orders in the drawer and a dragon-seal humming under his ribs. He didn’t have room for my metaphysics.

What he had was the next step. “Hassour Zainsubani,” he said. “Urshilaku-friendly. Poet. Scholar. If there’s sense to the Nerevarine talk, he knows which lines still have teeth. Go north. Bring me something I can brief without getting laughed out of a colonel’s tent.”

I filed two reports anyway: court-cant for the Blades—names, dates, the kind of truth that carries a seal—and alley-cant for the Guild—ferrymen, doors, patrol loops that forget to close. Before I left, I set two precautions where they’d find me if I didn’t return: a waxed tube under Edwinna’s second shelf in Ald’ruhn ( use only if the book bites back ), and a feather chalked into Velath Morain’s chapel step ( ferryman, midnight, two moons ).

I slept at the keep. The walls were still learning how to be walls. The wind practiced at the embrasures. In sleep I didn’t choose, Red Mountain breathed; the mask smiled; a star burned steady above a door I haven’t yet found; a cloak of shadow hung on a knob as if expecting my hand.

Morning would be north and ash and a poet with the right kind of memory. Night was a corridor with listening doors.

Reflection: The Edge of Many Blades
This month sharpened me between two stones. Dwemer knowledge cuts the mind; Hlaalu politics cut the soul; the dream cuts whatever is left. I am a noble, a duelist, a researcher, a killer—and still a spy who writes in ink for emperors and cant for cats. The mask waits. Perhaps my greatest deception is the one I sell to myself: that I can carry all these blades without bleeding. We’ll see what Hassour thinks of men who dream with their eyes open.

What I hold now feels less like power and more like inventory: pages full of ratios that promise air can bear weight; a keep built to speak softly in stone; a border set straight with one quiet incision; a ledger that balances only because some numbers are written in shadow. I keep two account books—one for the Council, one for the Underroad. In the first, totals and titles; in the second, feathers scratched under hinge plates ( sky clear ), fishhooks on pier piles ( fence drinks fair ), and a broken circle where a door should never be used again. Between them, I pass messages the way I pass through a crowded room: shoulder angled, breath shallow, eyes busy being elsewhere.

I have begun to feel the province answer. Doors choose to open before I knock. Patrols blink exactly when my step lands. In the rafters of Velath Morain, the tiles that don’t squeak seem to remember my weight. That is the danger of competence: the world starts to accommodate you, and you forget that it is not your servant. When I walk the parapet at dusk and the wind stills just enough for the rope to lie quiet, I thank Nocturnal under my breath and do not ask why. When a single star hangs stubborn in a clouded sky above the Odai mouth, I let Azura have my eyes a heartbeat longer than is sensible—then look away, because looking is its own oath.

Debts accrue: to Curio for the stair he lets me climb while pretending not to watch my feet; to Edwinna for the questions she asks that pry my mind open like a gear-casing; to the miners who sing low and steady and turn my dirt into coin; to the cats who risk lantern light because I drew a feather where no one else would; to Caius, who taught me to breathe on the exhale and to measure what I owe against what I will not pay. And there are other debts—the kind you don’t write: to a city that raised me with indifference and luck, to a House that may yet claim me or cut me, to a mountain that dreams in heat and ash and uses my name like a test.

I have learned that truth is worse than a blade with no hilt; it is a blade with many, each wrapped in someone else’s skin. The Dwemer leave instructions that are almost kindness. Hlaalu leaves opportunities that are almost friendship. The dream leaves summons that are almost love. Each invites the hand. Each asks for blood.

So I count: breaths before doors; steps between guards; debts before favors; names before midnight. I leave dead drops where stone won’t gossip, and I keep one letter folded against my heart—not for sentiment, but for weight. If I begin to float on my own skill, that weight reminds me there is still ground, and it is made of bone and ledger lines.

Soon I go north—to Hassour Zainsubani, to verses older than the ink that condemns them, to a camp where prophecy is spoken without permission. Tonight, I walk my walls once, touch the places where the mortar stays cool, and let the wind carry my unasked questions out over the river. If the gods answer, they do it the way I prefer: with nudges, not declarations. A quieter shadow here. A clearer star there.

I am many edges. I intend to remain sheathed until the work requires otherwise. But I am not fool enough to think I won’t bleed. The question is when, and for whom.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Master of the Arena
Partner of the Golem-Seers
Blade of House Hlaalu
Shadow of the Empire

Chapter Text

Chapter 8 – The Skeleton Key
Eighth Entry – 18th of Sun’s Height, 3E 427
Location: Balmora, Vivec, and the Shadows Between

“Some doors are locked for a reason. Others only to test the resolve of the one holding the key.”

Gentleman Jim Stacey, Ledger Under the Laughter

I woke with Hassour Zainsubani already walking north inside my skull—route penciled, ash in the teeth—when a South Wall runner rapped a Guild rhythm on my door: soft, syncopated, not quite music. He handed me a feather folded thrice around an obsidian bead. Alley-cant: Master seeks mirror—the Guildmaster wants to see what you show back. In tidy court-cant beneath: Summons to Vivec. Discretion assumed.

Two roads unrolled. The Blades’ errands. Or mine. I tied off the pack and went south.

The Balmora circle coughed me into Vivec’s Mages Guild with the scent of chalk and warmed copper. I let the city talk first. Foreign Quarter: a chalk fishhook high on a pier piling (ferryman drinks fair); two short verticals by a maintenance hatch (watch loop breaks here); a sideways V at a drain lip (no steel inside). I bought a bad fig from a good fishmonger and asked for “dusted” ones—the word you use when you want the rumor under the ledger. He tapped his scale pan twice with a nail—two taps: try the books.

Jobasha’s Rare Books keeps its secrets alphabetized. I thumbed a spine I didn’t need and said, lightly, “I’m looking for an index that isn’t in the catalog.”

Jobasha’s eyes twinkled the way lantern-oil does before it remembers fire. “Ah, sera seeks… addenda.” He coughed into a sleeve, then palmed a curtain-cord that was not a curtain-cord. A shelf sighed. A panel remembered it could be a door.

The corridor beyond smelled of old pages and new plans. At the end: a room arranged for conversation, not hospitality. Kresh on a low table. Two cups. One man.

He was Redguard, grey dreadlocks beaded like a ledger—each story weighed and counted. Linen coat, sleeves rolled. Hands clean in the way a surgeon’s are clean. Eyes that smiled and added at the same time.

“Nuada Hlaalu,” he said, like he was confirming a figure he already knew. “I’m Gentleman Jim Stacey. I prefer to know the knives before I set the table.”

“Gentleman,” I said. “I prefer tables that know their knives.”

We fenced, soft and sharp.

“You’ve made friends of sugar and salt,” he said—Habasi and Aengoth without saying them. “Friends sell me hope. I buy results.”

“I’ve brought ledgers you can audit,” I answered. “One written in ink, one in chalk. Both balance.”

He poured and didn’t drink. “Captains speak well of you. Captains are paid to be optimistic.”

“Then you’ll want proofs, not testimonials.”

“Three,” he said, smiling. “Data points.”

He laid them out like cutlery.

“First, lift a sealed Temple tariff from a Hlaalu counting-room and leave the seal virginal. If the seal blushes, it doesn’t count.”

“Done quietly or done beautifully?” I asked.

“Done so the clerk argues with himself and loses,” he said.

“The second?” I pressed.

“A dead drop disappears while being watched. I don’t care how. Make the watchers part of the vanishing. If they go home angry, better. Angry men tell truer stories.”

“And the third,” I said, though I already knew he was saving the grin for it.

He obliged. “Steal a staff from a Telvanni wizard. Felen Maryon. Daylight. No corpses. If I wanted corpses I’d shop the Tong.”

We held each other’s gaze a beat longer than comfort.

“Simple on parchment,” I said.

“Impossible in stories,” he said, still smiling. “We don’t live in stories.”

I gave him a small bow. “We edit them.”

—

The tariff wanted to be stolen. They always do. I learned the clerk’s day until his habits said please. A bump in a stairwell, a soap-print of a key, a brass twin that forgave me on the first try. The seal left the way it arrived. The paper decided it had always lived in my sleeve. I left a feather under the desk lip—wing clear; sky clear—for whatever cat needed a reminder that good routes deserve to live.

The dead drop vanished in a crowd that I made and then unmade. A street conjurer’s patter, a coin behind a child’s ear, a parcel that was under a barrel and then simply… wasn’t. I chalked a broken circle on the barrel rim—storm spent; change your route—so my own wouldn’t waste the trick twice.

When I returned, Jim didn’t clap. He adjusted the cups a fraction, like the table had just leveled.

“Two,” he said. “Now the one that decides whether we talk about salaries or about friendships.”

“Felen Maryon,” I said. “Telvanni.”

He tipped his head. “Towers that grew themselves, doors that listen, apprentices who don’t. Noon, not midnight. Eyes expect thieves at night.”

“I’ll need a buyer’s tongue and a cat’s feet,” I said. “And a thread that forgets how to sing.”

“Bring it back,” he said. “No blood. No noise. Steal, don’t win.”

—

Here’s the adjusted heist segment with Felen in Tel Branora , including the boat runs out and back:

The Tel Branora Lift

Tel Branora rises out of Azura’s Coast like a conspiracy—fungus spires glazed in salt, docks stitched together by rope and rumor. I didn’t trust the silt striders that far southeast, so I bought silence on a skiff out of Ebonheart: two taps beneath the second pier (ferryman clean), a feather chalked low on the gunwale (sky clear), and we slid along the coast with the reefs whispering teeth.

We made landfall at dawn, mist clinging to the mushroom roots. Telvanni courtesies are just knives with better cutlery; I wore court-cant at the dock (“bonded textiles, vat weights, caravan indemnities”), and alley-cant under my breath—sideways V at a bollard (no steel inside), two short verticals on a mooring post (watch loop breaks here). The local cats answered with a thumb-smudge near the stair rise: ask the apprentice who yawns at the third bell.

Felen Maryon kept rooms in a side-bulb below the Mistress’s tower, the sort of annex that pretends to be unimportant until it isn’t. I cased it twice in daylight, once at fogfall. Ward-threads hummed a half-note sharp—real—strung across a lintel that wanted to catch the careless. Noon would be the hour; eyes grow lazy when lunch has opinions.

I arrived as a cloth factor with a ledger full of lies and a bundle of swatches that looked like contracts. The apprentice yawned on schedule. I “tripped,” apologized in Cyrodiilic, and lifted a soap-print of the study key as I steadied him. By the time the third bell faded, Aengoth’s cutter had turned that print into brass in the back room of a Tel Branora wineshop that advertises eel pies and sells information.

Ghost powder kissed the study jamb and taught the silk trip-thread to gleam. A pair of thin pins nudged it off its hymn. The lock accepted my twin with the complacency of old money. Illusion laid a skim of Calm across the room—light as salt on a thumb—just enough to make a blink last a breath too long.

Felen sat reading a page that kept trying to revise itself. The staff—carved, proud, the sort of wood that remembers spells—leaned in a cradle with opinions. I matched my reach to the exhale between his page turns, lifted the weight in one smooth sentence, and let the cradle keep arguing with absence. On the way out I scratched a tilted square low on the inside jamb (no steel drawn inside)—a courtesy to rooms that don’t need to learn the hard lesson.

Back to the dock through rope-ladders and resin-slick walkways. I left a broken circle on a piling (storm spent; change your route)—a little misdirection for anyone who tried to follow the same mistakes twice. The skiffman read my feather mark, counted my coin, and pushed us off. We ghosted past shoals and cliff mouths while netch drifted like lazy moons.

By sunset the Ebonheart sea-wall shouldered us back into Empire air. I walked the last leg to the Foreign Quarter with the staff wrapped in drab sailcloth that smelled of salt and patience, and descended behind Jobasha’s stacks to set it on Gentleman Jim Stacey’s table without a squeak of conscience or a drop of blood to stain the wood.

He didn’t clap. He adjusted the cups a finger-width—as if a table had just found its level—and said, “You’re either talented,” he said, “or very polite with lies.”

“Sometimes both,” I said, unwrapping the staff.

He ran a palm along the grain the way a banker strokes a bond and exhaled once, almost a laugh. “Habasi undersold you—kindness, I suspect. Aengoth over-itemized you—habit, I suspect.”

He set the staff aside carefully and refilled both cups. This time we drank.

“Understand me,” he said, leaning in, the beads in his dreads clicking like abacus bones. “I don’t make kings. I hire locksmiths. But sometimes a locksmith finds himself holding a scepter because he remembered where the hinges were. Keep bringing me results. I’ll keep bringing you doors.”

“I still have roads north,” I said. “An Ashlander poet with answers.”

“Poems won’t run away,” he said. “Masters sometimes do. For now, go. Spend your luck like a miser, not like a bard.”

We shook hands—his dry and warm, mine ink-stained—and I left the way I came: through books that aren’t in catalogs, past Jobasha’s smile, into a city that calls you thief with one hand and hires you with the other. North could wait one more night. The Master had seen his mirror, and it had reflected something he could use.

The Murder of Nads Tharen

First light, Hlaalu Plaza.
I woke to lacquered tiles and a skyline of cantons pretending to be mountains. The Hlaalu Plaza smells like resin and decisions; even the breeze feels notarized. I left a feather scratch on the inner baluster—wing clean; sky clear—for any cat checking my trail, and walked the spiral down to the Foreign Quarter with the Key warm against my ribs. Gentleman Jim Stacey was already awake behind Jobasha’s rare books, sipping something that steamed like a secret.

“Guildsworn gone quiet,” he said, setting a rough-cut garnet on the table as if it were punctuation. “Nads Tharen. Bring me the why and the who. If the who’s breathing, change that.”

I nodded. “And if the why has teeth?”

“Pull them,” he said, and shifted the tea cups half a thumb’s breadth until the table found its level. “Messages travel faster than men.”

The room that talked.
Nads rented two doors down from a cobbler in the St. Delyn Waistworks—good for quick exits, bad for favors because leatherworkers hear everything. The latch wasn’t bruised. Inside, the air had that sujamma-after-fighting smell, like anger gone to sleep in the bottle. Bed soaked. No overturned chair, no scuff of panic against the wall. A single set of boot prints on the reed mat—toes heavy—and a smear along the sill where a ring without a stone had caught and slipped. The table held two cups, but only one with lip-salt. One man drank; one didn’t.

I sifted the rushes with ash-salt dust. Boot-heel, worn left; a hitch at the second step—someone favoring a knee. A faint thread of oil on the latch tongue: whoever came knew to leave no scrape. No struggle. No chance.

Nads had kept a ledger (we all do, even if we pretend we don’t). His had three pages torn with careful hands, which is just another way of confessing you still want to be understood. In the jamb, I scratched a tilted square (no steel drawn inside) for the cats who’d come to clean and for the room itself—courtesy to the dead. I lifted a strand of hair off the bedding—long, wrapped twice around a terryclasp. The ends were singed. Not a worker’s habit. A habit of someone who plays with knives near mirrors.

Names in the smell of mazte.
The barkeep at the Cornerclub kept his nose in the bottles and his eyes anywhere else. I paid him with the kind of coin that expects silence and got words anyway. “Arvama Rathri,” he said, like spitting a date pit. “Drinks mazte like it owes her interest. Knife where compliments go. Plays hostess for men with fast hands and slower good sense.”

I left a fishhook under his counter—fence drinks fair—and went hunting for Arvama in the kind of backroom that mistakes lighting for taste. The door wore a sideways V (no steel inside); I palmed a pin and pushed anyway.

She was all lacquered cheekbones and a smile trained to survive bad evenings. “You’re the one looking for Nads,” she said—voice like a tune played a little too fast. Her eyes went to my empty hands and came back to my face with a kind of relief that only means someone’s about to do something stupid.

“He was one of ours,” I said.

“He was a mistake,” she said, and flicked a glance at the guard in the corner who had learned how to lean without learning when to move.

I set the strand of hair on her table. She didn’t blink. I set a ring-stone, cloudy and oval, beside it—lifted from a pawn board two doors down where the proprietor had called it “unmounted grief.” That blinked her.

“Talk,” I said, and let Calm dust the air—Illusion light as salt, the kind that makes a heartbeat choose reason over pride.

The confession with a knife in it.
Arvama confessed like it was bragging. Nads had been skimming—coin and names—and an “old friend with a new purse” had wanted a lesson sent. “I take silver to end noise,” she said, flexing her fingers like they expected applause. “He died easy. Easier than he lived.”

“He was Guild,” I said, stepping left so my shadow fell across the guard’s ankles. “That makes him ours in death as much as in life.”

She reached. I reached faster.

Her knife rode the first half of a bad decision; my off-hand took her wrist and wrote a new sentence. I turned her elbow into a question mark against the table, slid steel under the rib where breath learns what silence is, and let the guard decide whether he loved his longevity more than his employer. He did. He left foot-first, loud with it.

Arvama tried one more price: a name, half-swallowed—you don’t turn your throat that way unless you’ve practiced lying about it. “Tong,” she said, then made it smaller. “No. Friends of. The kind who hate cats and love knives.” Not quite Camonna, not quite clean. The kind of drift-allegiance that says a war hasn’t started yet, but someone’s already making posters.

I made it quick. The floor caught her pride and her blood together. I cleaned the blade on her boast and set a broken circle on the rear door—storm passed; don’t use this exit again—so my runners would reroute anyone who didn’t need the memory.

On her body: three keys, one paid-up temple tithe, a purse light for the work she claimed, and a ring with an empty setting and a smear the exact size of the sill-mark in Nads’s room. In her strongbox: two notes in a different hand—both careful not to say Tong, both careful to say cats, both stamped with a wax that smelled like cloves and iron. Enough for a suspicion; not enough for an accusation. Yet.

I moved Nads’s ledger back to my vest—pages still gone, edges still honest. I tucked the cloudy stone into my glove. You return things when you can; it makes the world choose a side more often than not.

Message sent.
Gentleman Jim read the room on me before he read the report. “You’re faster than her,” he said, which is cat-speak for you’re still breathing. I laid the ring-without-stone beside the stone-without-ring, and the notes that don’t say Tong.

“Bookkeeping,” I said. “And blood.”

He arranged the two halves of the jewelry so they remembered being whole. “Nads was a quiet ledger,” he said. “Quiet ledgers don’t kill themselves.” He didn’t smile. He let the silence approve of what we’d done. “Messages must be sent.”

We sent one—folded in silk and certainty, delivered to three rooms that believe in consequence: to the barkeep who will tell the right story, to the clerk who files temple tithes and notices patterns, and to a certain “friend of” the Tong who will wake to find his door wearing a tilted square (no steel drawn inside) and his pillow wearing a feather (sky clear so long as your hands are). It is possible to make a threat without writing it. It is better to make a certainty without saying it.

That night, Vivec’s canals carried the sujamma smell away. I walked the Hlaalu Plaza with my collar up and my shadow where it belonged. Above, Azura pinned one steady star low over the canton like a promise; in the alleys, Nocturnal turned a draft into a cloak. Nads’s ledger felt lighter now that it knew where it lived.

Jim slid the garnet back to me as I turned to go. “Keep the account open,” he said. “We’re going to balance more than books.”

The War in the Shadows

The back room behind Jobasha’s smelled of tea, old glue, and the ink of books that had learned to keep their own counsel. Gentleman Jim Stacey shifted a small pile of polished stones across the table like he was teaching me a game he’d invented.

“Say it plain,” I told him.

He tapped one stone—black, sharp-edged. “Camonna Tong,” he said. “Old Dunmer pride dressed in new cruelty. Loves knives more than it loves its children.”

He slid a second stone—iron-gray—until it kissed the first. “Fighters Guild. Bribed, bullied, or bored into being the Tong’s knuckles.”

“And the hand?” I asked.

He placed a heavy, dark-red piece on top. “Sjoring Hard-Heart. Guildmaster. Loyalty either bought or born from bloodlust. Either way, he bleeds.”

I leaned back. “A shadow war… How long has this been going?”

“Long enough. Better we name it than play pretend.” Jim’s grey dreadlocks swayed as he looked up at me, eyes bright as lamp oil. “You speak both dialects—alley and court. That makes you my hinge.”

“What’s the play?”

“We don’t chop the hand,” he said. “We numb the fingers.” He moved two smaller stones off to either side. “Eydis Fire-Eye, Balmora. Greed you can smell two alleys away. She keeps a little shrine to Clavicus Vile behind her practicalities. Put the Bitter Cup in her hands and she’ll swivel like a weather vane on a cliff.”

“And the other finger?”

“Hrundi. Old friend to Sjoring. Nord iron. But even old steel bends when heat finds it.” He tapped his chest. “He’s married a Dunmer girl. Sjoring disapproves. You apply truth like a lever.”

“No writs,” I said.

“No banners,” he agreed. “This isn’t Temple work. We send messages that look like accounting errors.” He placed a thin white stone between the gray and the red. “You take this path and you do it clean. If there’s blood, it’s because the story demands it, not because your temper did.”

I drummed a finger once on the table. “And if the Tong notices?”

“They already notice,” he said, smiling without softness. “But they don’t respect subtlety. We’ll teach them manners.” He pushed a fishhook-shaped token toward me. “Leave these where the cats need to know a fence drinks fair. And these—” he drew a tiny feather in the moisture ring left by his cup, “—where sky’s clear if they move quick.”

“What do you want on paper for the Blades?” I asked.

“A ledger that says we were never here.” He poured more tea, then stilled the cup so it wouldn’t rattle. “You’ll keep two books like you always do—ink for emperors, cant for cats. Same story, different verbs.”

I let a breath out slow. “You’re asking me to bring this war into the Light. There will be casualties."

“Nuada,” he said, kind for the first time, “the war’s been running since before you learned chalk. I’m asking you to win it without turning the city into a sermon.” He nudged the red stone—Sjoring—so it wobbled. “When the fingers stop moving, the hand will be alone. People will notice.”

I glanced at the door, where the shop’s hush pressed close. “Any lines I shouldn’t cross?”

“Only the loud ones.” He tilted his head. “No children. No bystanders. No stunts that make the Temple write poetry about us. We are thieves. We take what’s needed and leave the room tidy enough that shame does half our work.”

“And when the last message lands?”

“Then I put a lockpick in your hand with a name,” he said. “Skeleton Key. She likes to live with someone who uses her for doors worth opening.” His grin flashed. “Earn it.”

I stood. “Eydis first. Then Hrundi. Then we tap Sjoring’s hammer until the handle cracks.”

Jim rose as well, palm brushing mine in a clasp that checked for daggers and found none. “Good. Leave a broken circle if the storm’s spent and you need a new route. Two nested chevrons if the ferryman’s still good for one more run.” He started rearranging his stones back into a harmless scatter. “And Nuada—”

I paused at the curtain.

“Messages must be sent,” he said. “But make sure the last line reads: we were here, and the city is better for it.”

“Feather on your lintel,” I said.

“Sky clear,” he answered, and the shop swallowed me like a secret it intended to keep.

Jim’s plan loved deniability. The public face would never be ours. We would make the Fighters Guild doubt its own chain of command first. Eydis Fire-Eye’s greed? A door left on the latch; the Bitter Cup slid across that threshold like a prayer answered. Hrundi’s loyalty? A quieter door—his bride’s safety, and what Sjoring’s temper meant for it. Friendship bends where fear only breaks and splinters back. Each “finger” we numbed meant one fewer squad answering the Tong’s whistle and one more whisper inside their walls asking, Why am I dying for another man’s ledger?

Meanwhile we pinched coin where it bled loudest. I turned Hlaalu’s paper knives on the Tong’s legal fronts: licensing “irregularities” for their taverns, grain inspections that fail on Thursdays, new tariffs on “recovery services” that look like extortion if you squint. A clerk in the Grand Council saw stamps as a kind of music; I taught him a new tune. The Tong still swung, but every swing cost more and reached less.

We salted their stories, too. A writ of honorable retribution delivered to the wrong address. A Redoran hotspur “witnessing” a Tong captain selling spice to Temple novices. A Fighters Guild quartermaster waking to find he’d requisitioned weapons for men who didn’t exist. Court-cant dressed the lies in good clothes; alley-cant moved them where truth never walks alone. By the time anyone checked, the rumor had already bought a drink, found a chair, and joined the conversation.

I seeded countersigns in the city for the long work: two short verticals scratched knee-high on a post (watch loop breaks here); a tiny star behind a cistern (roof road to east, safe in rain); a chalk feather under a stair (sky clear; run now). Cats moved on these like veins on a map, and the Tong’s patrols began to arrive just late enough to be useless. They looked clumsy. Clumsy breeds doubt. Doubt breeds silence. Silence lets us work.

And beneath all that, I kept a second set of plans—darker ink for a later page. The Tong was a blade pointed at everyone’s throat, including ours. If I could turn that blade inward, sheath it inside House Hlaalu’s robe and teach it to cut only where I point, I would have what I’ve needed since I set foot on this island: a way to keep the Empire’s peace and my House’s profit without asking permission. This war was not just survival. It was an apprenticeship for power.

When Jim finally nodded toward Sjoring’s name, the room felt colder. “The fist,” he said, “when you’re ready.” I was ready. Not because I wanted his head—though I would take it—but because I could see the thing that would follow: a Tong without a heartbeat unless I told it to breathe. That is how you end a syndicate in Morrowind. Not with fire. With famine. With favors. With a ledger that says you belong to me now, and you like it.

Fire-Eye and the Bitter Cup

Eydis Fire-Eye, Balmora’s iron smile, kept a shrine to Clavicus Vile behind her practicalities. Her greed creaked when she walked. The Bitter Cup would swivel her loyalties like a weather vane on a cliff.

I didn’t guess the shrine; I paid for it. A South Wall cat saw her light a stick of resin in the back office on Fredas nights—curled-horn idol, dog’s grin, a coin laid face-up. Another runner found a prayer-knife with Vile’s sigil tucked in her boot. I drew a thin brass map of Eydis that night: where the hunger lives, where the hinge is.

The Cup itself was a rumor with a bailiff’s handwriting. A smuggler in Suran claimed a collector in Hla Oad had bought “a wish in a bowl.” The collector’s ledger—lifted from a desk that squeaked only on the exhale—named a Telvanni factor who’d fenced something old and dangerous out of a drowned ruin. I walked the chain backward in court-cant and alley-cant both: polite questions over fortified wine, then quiet hands in salt-stink storerooms. When the trail finally sank into a hillside barrow, I went in alone with wax on my soles and oil on the hinges. No magic. No Key. Just patience where the lock wanted noise and a breath held long enough to make a guard believe the night had nothing else to say.

The Cup waited where bad bargains gather—black metal that drank light, rim kissed with a color that isn’t a color until it owns you. I wrapped it in oilcloth that remembered other sins and brought it home like a bomb that purrs.

Clavicus Vile is the shape a bargain wears when it wants to be believed. He doesn’t take your soul; he rents your judgment. His artifacts don’t shout—they nod. Yes, you deserve this. Yes, you were wronged. Yes, a small price. The Mistress of Shadows will lend you the silence to steal such a thing if it amuses her to see it moved; the Lady of Dusk will weigh where you set it down. Between them, I carried a god’s joke very carefully.

I staged the handoff in a room Eydis trusted: the Fighters Guild training hall before dawn, sweat still sleeping in the floorboards. I set the Cup on the table between us and told a story about honor and destiny that she wanted to believe—Sjoring spending her men like coin, the Guild’s name rotting under his thumb, the way Balmora would speak if only it had her voice. I never said “wish.” I never had to. A woman who bows to Vile never met a promise she didn’t think she could control.

She touched the Cup like it might purr. “What would you have me do?” she asked, which is the sentence that tells you the war belongs to you now. I didn’t tell her to do anything. I put ledgers in reach: proof Sjoring skimmed contracts; requisitions that vanished; a sworn statement from a quartermaster who wanted to stop waking up guilty. “Do what makes the Guild strong,” I said, because that is what greed hears when it wants to be bravery.

Seeding the ground took a dozen small cuts. I soured Sjoring’s supply lines—two crates that arrived light, three writs that looped in the courier’s bag until they were late enough to be embarrassing. I let a rumor slip (court-cant, respectable) that the Council in Vivec admired Eydis’s “prudence.” I scratched a feather under her chair (wing clear—push now) and a broken circle on the Guild’s side door (storm spent; change the route) so my cats knew when to spread which stories in which ears.

When the wind changed, it was because she told it to. Eydis began sending me copies of Sjoring’s orders—at first “by mistake,” then on purpose. She held drills when he scheduled raids, audits when he called for celebrations, and private talks with sergeants who were tired of burying men for someone else’s ledger. Each “coincidence” robbed him of momentum. Each “prudence” bought her another room where people spoke lower when she entered. The Bitter Cup didn’t cast a spell; it gave her permission to prefer herself—and once she did, the Guild learned a new angle for its spine.

The gods watched the way gods do. Vile smiled from the seam of the story every time Eydis said the word deserve. Nocturnal’s cool approval followed my hands when I put the Cup where it would be found; she cares for craft, not cause. Azura didn’t forbid it—she weighed it, and let it stand. Dusk is for choices that won’t look like choices until the next chapter.

Eydis was the first finger numbed. She wasn’t mine; she was her own, and that was enough to turn her away from Sjoring. A fist loses strength when the fingers forget they’re supposed to close at the same time.

Hrundi’s Choice

Hrundi and Sjoring were not just guildmates; they were winters endured together. I learned the shape of their bond the way I learn most things—by paying for a dozen versions and laying them over each other until the overlaps told the truth.

From a legionnaire who drinks too late: the two Nords met in Kyne’s Watch, brawled, bled, and laughed in the same night, then took oaths over a frost-slick oath-stone. From a caravan leader out of Windhelm: they ran steel together along the Karth, stood back-to-back above a broken cart while bandits circled. From an old porter in Ald’ruhn: when a kagouti ripped Sjoring open on the West Gash, Hrundi carried him three days to a healer; later, when dreugh dragged Hrundi off a Hla Oad pier, Sjoring went in after him with an axe and a curse. Shield-brothers—the kind that make ordinary men walk taller just by standing in the same door.

Then the crack: Sjoring took Camonna Tong gold and, with it, their hatreds. The Tong’s bile runs one color—xenophobia—and he drank deep. Hrundi, who had the old Nord habit of calling a good fire good no matter whose hearth it was, married a Dunmer outlander. Sjoring named it weakness. The Tong named it worse.

I didn’t invent a wedge; I found the one already there and put weight on it.

A South Wall cat lifted a letter from Sjoring’s desk—polite words that smelled like iron, “discipline” and “impropriety” wrapped around a threat to reassign Hrundi “back to the snows” if his “household” did not satisfy Guild decorum. A Temple scribe I paid twice as much not to remember me copied a Tong ledger: disbursements “for correction” tagged to Hrundi’s district the week his wife received a stone thrown through her window with a slur carved into it. An old shield-knot token—two twisted wires they’d traded in Skyrim—turned up in a pawn box near the Foreign Quarter; Sjoring had sold his half. That told me more than any letter.

I asked for no secret meeting. I went to him where he is strongest—Sadrith Mora’s Fighters Guild hall, bear-fur on the wall, mead-horn on the table, Telvanni fungus looming like a bad sermon outside. Hrundi’s hands are the kind that can set a shoulder or break a jaw; they were very still.

“Your friendship has become a barred beam across your wife’s door,” I said, and set the proofs between us: Sjoring’s letter, the Tong ledger strip, the twisted-wire token. “He took money from men who would burn her name out of your house, then he sold your oathstone.”

He sat with the words the way a Nord sits with an injury—quiet long enough to make a healer sweat, then loud enough to wake the neighbors, then quiet again while the pain names itself. He stared at the knot until the wires stopped being metal and started being years.

“There were wars,” he said at last. “We bled in the same mud.” His voice dropped. “But I do not invite a man into my hall who spits on my hearth.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Stand out of the way when the night comes for him. Call your captains off. Let this be my fight. Keep your home.”

Old steel bends when heat finds it. His Dunmer bride was the heat; I just moved the brazier closer.

He sent three messages that night, each sealed in plain wax so they’d look like nothing at a glance. To Ald’ruhn, Balmora, and Buckmoth: Stand down from Vivec movements until further notice. To Sadrith Mora’s sergeants: No auxiliaries to travel south at Sjoring’s word unless countersigned locally. To one old friend in Ebonheart: Do not die for a man who sold your winters for coin. He didn’t bless me; he did something better—he made absence where Sjoring expected presence.

I laced the streets with my own signals to make sure the message took root: a tilted square scratched low on guild doors (no steel inside—keep tempers sheathed), a broken circle on the side gates (storm spent; change your route), a feather under two benches (sky clear—wait and watch). Runners carried the same idea in two dialects: in court-cant to the respectable—“operational pause for audit”—and in alley-cant to the cats—“hands off, eyes open.”

Eydis Fire-Eye had already turned her face from the Guildmaster for reasons that sounded like honor when spoken aloud and like Vile’s whisper when said in the right room. With Hrundi stepping aside, the second finger went numb. The fist that was supposed to close over me found it could not make a proper fist at all.

That was the point. Remove the first captain by convincing her to prefer the Guild to the man. Remove the second by reminding him that home is a better oath than history. After that, every Fighters Guild captain in Vvardenfell looked at the board and saw the same thing: standing between Sjoring and what was coming would not be brave—it would be stupid.

The king was exposed. All that remained was timing, silence, and the correct absence of witnesses.

Blood on the Canton Roof

I climbed Vivec’s Foreign Quarter by its scars: gutter, dovecote, lintel, a run of tiles that don’t squeak if you keep your weight on the outside edge. My fingers knew the map my eyes couldn’t see—mortar-lips, bird-nests, a cracked cornice that takes a boot like it was carved for it. I left cant for my runners—two chevrons under the eave (ferryman good for one more run), a tiny star by a vent (cat road only; don’t bring steel), and a broken circle on the rear postern (storm brewing; change your route). Below me, the Fighters Guild Hall slept the heavy sleep of men who trust locks. Above me, Masser and Secunda hung fat and close, red light and pearl, like a pair of judges who’d stayed past closing.

Habasi’s floor-plan rode in my head—watch turns, a captain’s room two doors down, Sjoring’s door at the end of a spine of stone. I matched breath to footfall and timed the patrol loops by the lazy way a lantern swings when a man thinks he owns the dark. The window latch on his corridor should have been stiff; I’d tested it two nights prior. Tonight it lifted clean, too clean, like a hinge recently told a secret. The wick smoke in the hall smelled fresh—trimmed within the hour. No snoring behind the nearest door. Someone had swept footprints where dust should have kept score.

A prickle ran the length of my neck. It wasn’t Nocturnal’s cool approval; it was the feeling of being seen by a room. I checked my exits—up and out, down and through, or left into the armory if things soured. Then I saw the last tell: war paint. You can smell it, resin and iron, even beneath lamp oil and leather. My palm went slick around the knife.

Sjoring waited—war paint fresh, hammer in hand, a smile that only knows one language. He stood centered in his chamber like a boulder that had decided to join a conversation. “So you come to kill me like a sneak-thief?” he roared, and the shout ran along the corridor like a thrown plate. Doors barked open. Boots beat stone. The trap was not his. It was mine—sprung in my face. For the first breath in years I felt the taste of failure: someone had sold a pattern, or he’d learned to read the chalk I don’t leave. Either way, I was not in control.

“Then let’s do it the hard way,” I answered, because sometimes the truth is the best lie and because my mouth needed to move so my hands could work. I rolled an oil flask to the threshold and kissed it with a spark. The doorway became doubt, flame reaching up like curious hands. The first three men who rushed it learned to reconsider—one slipped, one screamed, one decided to be brave somewhere else. Sjoring did not reconsider.

Smoke bought me the breath I needed to take the room’s measure back from him. I put a Calm on the nearest fool through the heat-haze—he blinked, forgot why he was alive, and sat down where the floor was less on fire. I put a throwing knife into the wrist that went for the horn. My off-hand blade wore a sheen of fast poison; it kissed whoever leaned too far through the doorway and wrote a short lesson on impulse control. I planted a feather mark low on the jamb with the soot (wing clipped—don’t follow) for any cat mad enough to come help.

Sjoring came through the flame like granite remembers it used to be mountain. My geometry returned; fear’s hand left my throat. Count exits. Count breaths. Let his weight finish where you promised it could. Control is a thing you take back as pieces. I started picking up the pieces.

The Battle with the Hard-Heart 

He hit like an avalanche—each swing a landslide, each breath a weather change. The first fall of his hammer collapsed a trestle into splinters; the second chewed stone from a pillar and salted the floor with grit. I moved the way Caius taught me: on the exhale, weight in the ball of the foot, let the room be a partner you lead. I put the space between us in pieces—kicked a chair to tangle his stance, slid a table into the hammer’s arc so the blow spent itself on oak, not me.

Poison kissed my off-hand blade—an oil that dries to no shine and writes short stories in a man’s blood. The first guildsman who rushed the door learned the ending. The second tripped on the first and died trying to get up; the third saw his future and chose a different profession, slamming the door as he fled. The corridor answered with boots—drum, drum, falter—and then the orange pop of a lamp overturning. Smoke pressed its face to the threshold and thought better of entering.

Sjoring advanced, hammer low now, the head skimming the floor in a brutal pendulum. When he rose into the swing, the room sighed. I stepped inside the arc—geometry, not courage—cut the soft seam at the inside elbow, rode the recoil to his off hip, and let his own weight carry him half a step further than he meant. His curse came out as a cough. He rotated, faster than a big man should, and the hammer caught me only in passing—still enough to ring the ribs, teach them humility. I filed the pain for later.

He tried to corner me at the bedpost. I let him own the space, then stole the angle: heel to the bedframe, knee to the chest, roll—the hammer shattered the post I had occupied a breath ago. Feathers from the burst pillow whirled like albino ash. The room became snow and thunder.

He bled from three cuts now, lungs working hard, war paint running in his sweat. “Stand,” he barked—an order to his men who were no longer there. I gave him a different command: a feint high, a real cut low, then the seam—always the seam—where leather remembers being skin. The blade slid beneath the cuirass at the ribs; his air went ragged. He swung anyway. He was the kind of man who believes force is an answer to every question. I am the kind of man who asks better ones.

Boots in the corridor drummed, then faltered, then stopped. Someone—perhaps everyone—remembered the poison and the smoke and the way Sjoring’s breath now had to find him. One by one the bodies stilled, choices remade in silence. The world narrowed to two men and the arithmetic of endings.

When his knee found the floor, he looked almost relieved—warriors often do, at the moment the decision leaves them. I stepped behind the breath between breaths, hooked the dagger beneath his chin where the beard thins, and drew a line he could not argue with. His hard heart stopped insisting.

I left a cant sign for my own runners—a tiny broken circle burned into the underside of the window latch ( storm spent; don’t use this exit again ). Then I wiped the blade on the bed’s ruined sheet, listened until the corridor remembered how to be empty, and took what I had come for: the end of a problem and the proof of it.

The Key to All Things 

I stitched Vivec together in midnight seams—roof to roof on tiles that don’t complain (two black, three grey, one cracked), gutter to gutter where rain remembers my weight. Under the Foreign Quarter eave I chalked a feather (sky clear) for any of my cats on the run; on a side-door I left a tilted V (no drawn steel) so a drunk wouldn’t become a witness by accident.

The hidden door behind Jobasha’s gave under the old knock—three taps, one breath, two taps—and the back room breathed oil, tea, and old wood. Gentleman Jim Stacey stood there like a priest at a plain altar, grey dreadlocks tied back, lamplight taking the lines at the corners of his mouth and making them look like choices he’d kept.

I set Sjoring’s head on the table. The room did the counting so we didn’t have to.

Jim didn’t flinch. He just tipped his chin—as if we’d finished a ledger together—and said, “Master Thief Nuada. The title is yours.”

Not ceremony. Appointment.

He opened a small oiled wrap and laid something in my palm that felt warm enough to be listening: a lockpick balanced like a promise, weight that knew where in a hand it wanted to live.

“The Skeleton Key,” he said. “Nocturnal’s favor, not her forgiveness.”

It twitched once—greeting, not startle—and settled as if my palm were the pocket it had been measured for. The lamp didn’t flicker, but the room cooled; my shadow lengthened without moving. I felt the kind of touch that steadies a child on the first step of a roof road. Somewhere between our heartbeats, a door I hadn’t known I’d been leaning against unlatched—not wood, not brass. Permission.

Jim watched me feel it and smiled like a man who’d gotten away with something elegant. “She’s polite, that one. Never force her. Keys are a conversation, not a conquest.”

“What does she cost?” I asked, because nothing that opens everything comes free.

“Attention,” he said. “A little nightshade when you can find it. A black feather on a windowsill the city thinks is yours. A tithe of quiet—meaning you leave some doors closed because a closed door keeps a street from collapsing.” He lifted a finger. “And manners. Nocturnal loves a craftsman, hates a braggart. You start using her to show off, she’ll open you instead of the lock.”

He poured tea into two chipped cups, slid one to me, then leaned both hands on the table the way a ship’s captain takes his bearings. “While we’re tallying: the Guild. You don’t inherit my swagger, you inherit my schedules. Runners paid before fences. Ferrymen warm in winter. Widows’ purse never empty. No children. No bystanders. Don’t make the Temple write poetry about us. We leave rooms tidier than we found them so shame does half our work.”

I nodded. “And the Tong?”

“We keep them ornamental,” he said, almost cheerful. “Dagger on a wall, not in a hand. The Camonna boys will snarl because that’s their art, but they eat from the same table now; don’t let them cut the cloth.”

He tapped the Key once, soft. “Leadership isn’t the loud job, Nuada. You’ll spend more nights deciding which job not to take than which one to steal. If a councilor thinks they own us—sell them a rumor and a delay. If a cat thinks they own the city—send them to sweep roofs until humility sticks. If an emperor thinks he owns you…” He tilted his head, weighing me. “You already know how to write two ledgers. Keep doing it.”

I let a breath out through my teeth. “You’re stepping away.”

“I’m stepping sideways,” he corrected. “Into a softer chair and a longer memory. The Guild needs a hinge that speaks both tongues and doesn’t squeak when it moves. Habasi and Aengoth say you make rooms quieter just by walking in. I’ve seen it now. Good.” He turned the oiled wrap toward me, empty. “This is a loan, mind. The Key lives with the Guild; you’re just where she sleeps.”

“What about Az—” I stopped. The name had been at the back of my tongue since the room cooled.

Jim’s eyes crinkled. “Dawn-and-Dusk watches, even if she isn’t ours. Let her weigh your footprints; let the Night Mistress weigh your hands. If they both keep silent, you’re working at the right hour.”

He straightened, and the priest at the altar was gone; a quartermaster remained. “Three more things. One: never use the Key to open oaths—temple seals, marriage boxes, locks with names cut in them. She’ll open them, and you won’t like what that opens in you. Two: keep a Lamplighter’s Fund. When a cat goes to ground, the light in his mother’s window stays lit. People notice that kind of grace. Three: if you must leave a message, make it about the job, not the thief. Pride is a patrol that never sleeps.”

I took the tea, hot and plain. “What do I call you now?”

“Jim,” he said, relief underneath the grin. “Or ‘that old Redguard who owed me money’ if anyone’s listening.”

We clasped forearms—check for steel, find only pulse—and I felt the Key thrum once between us, a cat’s purr you hear in bone.

Out of habit I chalked a feather on his lintel (sky clear, master), though this room needs no warnings. He arched a brow. “Old habits,” I said.

“Keep the good ones,” he answered. “Break the bad.”

In the alley, I tried the Key on a practice lock I carry to keep my hands honest. The pick didn’t pick; it persuaded. Tumblers fell over themselves to be helpful, and the shackle rose like a yawn. No metal scraped. No click bragged. The lock simply agreed to a better story.

Vivec shifted minutely—as if a hinge had been oiled and the whole city noticed. I slipped the Key against my ribs where it wanted to live and walked out into streets that felt a half-shade friendlier to my feet.

Reflection: Of Doors and Dreams 

A soft knuckle-tap found the doorframe—three quick, one slow—the Guild’s morning knock for “message, not trouble.” I was upright before the last rap finished being wood.

A cat no older than I’d been when Caius first taught me to breathe like a shadow stood in the hall, cloak still wet with cantons’ mist. He held the note on two fingers the way professionals do, so no one can say you passed anything to anyone.

“From the steam-woman,” he whispered—our nickname for Edwinna—then added the alley-cant blessing, “sky clear,” with a tilt of his chin.

I slipped him two coins and a crumb of sujamma-bread, then scratched a tiny feather mark on the jamb (delivery clean; route safe) for any eyes following him that belonged to me. The seal was Edwinna’s: sharp, inked, impatient.

Nchuleftingth near Suran. Report missing. Hands and patience required.

Plain duty. The kind that keeps a blade honest.

I packed the way I’ve always packed—quietly, twice:

• Daggers: the work pair honed to wet-paper sharp, and the ugly backup that forgives mistakes.
  
  
• Picks: my roll of honest steel for when I don’t want to ask a god’s favor; the Skeleton Key tucked inside my inner sash, warm as a cat and purring in that metal register thieves hear in their bones.
  
  
• Coils and hooks: spider-silk line, two pitons, a folding grapple that loves Dwemer railings.
  
  
• Powder and glass: ghost-dust for vanishing edges; chalk for cant (feather, chevrons, broken circle); a thumb-bottle of lamp oil; a mirror the size of a coin.
  
  
• Phials: restore breath, cure poison, Detect Creature (Edwinna’s fault and favor), and a stingy sip of water-walking in case the ruin remembered to flood its welcome.
  
  
• Cloth and coin: a dark scarf that reads as merchant in daylight and nothing at night; loose gold split three ways (bribe, ferry, loss).
  
  
• The practice lock—discipline in brass—so I remember it’s art before it’s prayer.
  
  

I left house-cant for my runners—two fine verticals under the window latch (watch loop breaks here at dusk), a shallow spiral chalked behind the trunk (meet at moonrise if I don’t return), and a note in court hand on the desk for any visitor with titles: routine survey, Vivec → Balmora → Suran, back when the ledger says so.

Cloak. Harness. Boots that remember roofs. I pinched the lamp out with two fingers, felt Nocturnal’s cool settle in the room as the last smoke line rose, and stepped into the Hlaalu Plaza before the vendors had decided what their prices were.

Route set: Vivec Mages Guild circle to Balmora, strider to Suran, legs the rest of the way. The Key hummed once against my ribs—approval or reminder—and I touched it like a priest touches a promise he intends to keep.

I left at first light, the Skeleton Key heavy in my pocket and heavier in my mind. I can open any door now. That is the danger: you begin to believe doors were made for you. You begin to forget that some locks protect people, not secrets; that some thresholds are promises, not puzzles. The door I need most will not be opened by steel, brass, or blessing. It will open—or refuse—for reasons older than any lock and more stubborn than any hinge.

I routed my day in cant as much as ink: a fishhook on the second pier piling in Suran ( fence drinks fair ), two small verticals on a mill door *( watch loop breaks here ), and a tiny feather under a cistern lip by the ruin ( breath spot—wait out the patrol ). For the Guild, these are kindnesses; for me, they’re reminders that a map is not a crown.

If the Key is a promise, it is also a debt. Doors opened create obligations—witnesses spared, ledgers altered, lives unended because mine continued. The Key does not absolve me of choosing. It only removes the excuse of inability.

Nchuleftingth will ask for patience, not glory. Good. Let the dream starve a night on the road while I count steps and pressure plates. Let the golden mask pace the perimeter of my sleep and find no purchase. If it comes anyway, I’ll do what I have always done: breathe on the exhale, measure the room, make the door.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Master Thief of Morrowind
Bearer of the Skeleton Key
Knife in the Dark
Spy in the House of Ash

Chapter Text

Chapter 9 – Daggers in the Dark
Ninth Entry – 4th of Last Seed, 3E 427
Location: Vivec, Dren Plantation, and the Long Road to Narsis

“Power is not taken in one stroke—it is gathered, hidden in the folds of shadows until it becomes a storm.”

Master of the Guilds

I put the north on hold—not out of neglect, but out of triage. Hassour Zainsubani would still be an Ashlander tomorrow; House Hlaalu’s mood, the Guild’s routes, and the Temple’s temperature could shift by sunset.

So I worked the streets I owned.

Mornings were South Wall: I drank thin sujamma with fences who prefer to be called ferrymen now, scratched a feather under the stair (sky clear) and two chevrons by the cellar hatch (good courier, one run left), and listened while the cats told me which doors had learned new songs in the night. I kept Habasi briefings in alley-cant—tilted squares on lintels for no drawn steel, broken circles on back gates for storm spent; change your route—then crossed the river and put on silk sleeves.

Afternoons were House hours. Nileno Dorvayn and I traded favors like chess pieces: a shipment “re-evaluated off-ledger” in Caldera, a permit that needed to appear in the right pile, a clerk who required a polite scare. I translated merchants’ anxieties into council language—“market headwinds” (Redoran throttling caravans), “liquidity constraints” (someone needs a fence), “increased regulatory interest” (Ordinators sniffing)—and in return got their ledgers to breathe my name. A junior factor slipped me a list of magistrates who prefer gifts to arguments; a caravan master from Suran swore by my roof roads after I moved three crates that were never stolen back to where they had never been.

Nights belonged to whispers. I walked the cat’s roads above Balmora, resetting dead drops, swapping brush-passes with runners who thought they were alone, and planting court-cant notes where they would be found by exactly one set of eyes. In the gaps, I visited Hlaalu minor houses—cousins with silk and knives—learning who smiled with their mouths and who smiled with their budgets. The Camonna Tong were still a pressure at the edges; I let them see the outline of my shadow and not its reach.

House Hlaalu’s web lay within the easy reach of my hand, and I tugged it until it hummed. Crassius Curio, perfumed viper and political savant, felt the resonance before he saw me. He slid me closer to the inner council with a smile shaped like a contract. “The Duke should hear you,” he lilted, then let the silk drop from his tone. “And more importantly—you should hear the Duke.”

I meant to sleep on that. Instead, a runner found me before the ink dried—three quick knocks, one slow (message, not trouble). The seal on the summons smelled faintly of river wind and old authority: Duke Vedam Dren. The parchment read like a door opening.

Hassour would wait. The Empire was speaking. And when both gods and governors call, you answer in the order that keeps you alive.

The Robe of Saint Roris

Audience with the Duke

The cutter slid out from Vivec’s Foreign Quarter like a thought leaving a crowded room. We knifed south across the Inner Sea, wake stitching silver behind us. Ebonheart rose ahead—an Imperial bruise on volcanic coast: white bastions on black lava, banners of the Dragon snapping in a salt-wet wind. The harbor smelled of pitch and law.

On the quay, East Empire clerks argued softly over weights while Hawkmoth Legion troopers stood where arguments end. A bronze bell tolled the shift. Above it all, Castle Ebonheart kept its own weather—high towers, arrow slits like measured disapproval, the whole keep paneled by restraint and geometry the Dunmer never asked for.

I let the boatman see the edge of a seal and none of the story, then climbed the causeway. A sergeant with a jaw designed by regulation took my name and my knives, weighed both, and returned exactly one of them. A clerk in black-and-crimson led me through cool stone corridors where voices go to learn discipline, past the Imperial Cult’s quiet shrine (nine candles, nine small flames that never admit drafts), and into a chamber where power sits to think.

The Duke received me in a room paneled with restraint. No tapestries, no trophies—only polished wood, clean lines, a map-littered table with corners that had opinions. Vedam Dren rested his hands on the chair arms like hilts. The face was older than the skirmishes on it; the eyes remembered profit and loss before they remembered prayer.

“Nuada Hlaalu,” he said—not a question. “A kinsman by birth, a useful man by recent habit.” He gestured me to the far chair—close enough to be trusted, far enough to be read. “House business meets Imperial stability. You find seams between things, so let us speak in seams.”

“Your Grace,” I said, and let the title carry both fealty and invoice.

He watched me the way a bottler watches a flame. “The Ordinators have mistaken zeal for mandate. They have expanded ‘Temple security’ to include merchants’ stalls, Council courtyards, and any door they cannot see through. It pinches trade. Pinched trade squeals. I prefer my coin quiet.” His mouth made a thin line that could have been humor in a younger season. “Rebuke them—without making me the author of the sermon.”

A line only Hlaalu could write.

“What pulpit would you prefer I borrow?” I asked, court-cant polite. (translation: whose leverage buys silence cheapest?)

He tapped a knuckle on the map where Vivec’s cantons made their argument with water. “Tholer Saryoni hears hymns and politics at the same volume. He will not be seen taking orders from Ebonheart, or from Hlaalu. But he will accept the weight of a relic when the choir watches.” A pause. “There is talk of the Robe of Saint Roris. Returned, it might remind certain masks that mercy can be administrative.”

I let the thought sit between us and grow legs. “A sermon preached in silk is often best remembered,” I agreed. (translation: an artifact buys the leash you cannot write on paper.)

“Good.” He slid a small packet across the table—wax, not seal. “Not a writ. A courtesy to be shown if you are inconvenienced by a Legionary with ambitions. The rest is your craft.” He studied the way I took it—two fingers, no rustle. “Your reputation suggests you don’t trip over your own shadow. Keep it so.”

We let the air report on other matters without naming them. He kept the formal words, I watched the informal muscles.

“The Camonna Tong,” he said at last, like a man checking a figure he already knows. “They have been… persuaded to prefer one House’s prosperity over another’s revenge. Sensible.”

“Prosperity keeps its own books,” I said. (translation: they’ll do as they’re told while the ledger stays fat.)

“And the Morag Tong?” His tone didn’t change. Only the room felt it.

“They prefer clarity,” I said. “And schedules.” (translation: they’re not a problem unless someone decides to be noisy.)

He nodded once. “No noise.” Then, almost idly, “Red Mountain hums, and the Temple sings louder when it does. Make the streets quieter than both.”

We stood. He offered a soldier’s clasp, not a lord’s fingertips—memory of Hlaalu in the grip. “Do this cleanly,” he said. “And when next you come, we will speak of matters requiring a grandmaster’s handwriting rather than a kinsman’s initiative.”

On the way out I counted the keep the way a thief says grace: guard loops, blind corners, hinges that prefer oil to ceremony. At the harbor I scratched a neat feather high under the causeway rail—sky clear—for any cat of mine who’d have to come this way in a hurry, then hired the cutter back toward Vivec with the Duke’s careful mandate in my pocket.

A sermon needs a text. I had one to steal.

The road took me past Seyda Neen, where I first stepped ashore months ago—then a cipher with a Blade’s writ; now a kingmaker in shadow. I left a feather beneath the second pier ( ferryman safe ), touched the old gallows post for luck not owed to gods, and followed the salt reek south.

The island shrine hunched against weather, steps slick with spray. I watched until the last acolyte’s lantern dwindled to a wandering star, then traced the cat’s road: dune grass to parapet, parapet to rain gutter, gutter to a window whose latch had forgotten to object. A dab of ghost powder on the sill lay unruffled—no ward. Nocturnal pressed the night closer around my shoulders; Azura set a cold star low on the horizon as if to underline the sentence.

Inside, incense had lacquered the air. Two priests knelt, backs to me, prayers threading the room with a rhythm I could walk inside. I let Illusion dust the corners— Calm for nerves, a whisper of Gloom to keep eyes content with darkness—and moved on the exhale, step to worn stone, step to shadow.

The Robe waited behind an iron gate honest enough to be insulting. The Skeleton Key warmed in my palm, then persuaded the lock the way a gentle lie persuades a fool. I eased the gate, lifted the reliquary lid, and slid the faded silk into my cloak. Myrrh clung to the weave like a memory that hadn’t decided whether to be holy or sad.

On the way out I scratched a tiny broken circle on the inner frame— storm soon; change this route —and timed my breath to the last line of their chant. The door sighed. The sea agreed. The night forgot me in stages.

Saryoni’s hands weighed the Robe, his expression shifting from caution to the careful relief of a man whose prayer has been answered by logistics. “This will suffice,” he said, which is Temple for I will act and say I always meant to .

By the time I stood again before the Duke, messengers had outrun my horse. The Ordinators were withdrawn to the Temple precincts—zeal renamed focus, arrogance dressed as contemplation. “Efficient,” Vedam Dren said, the word falling like a coin through fingers that have counted too many. He did not ask how ; Hlaalu prefers results to recipes.

I left a tilted V on the palace service door— no drawn steel —and stepped back into a city that had shifted minutely, like a hinge newly oiled. Nocturnal kept the alleys kind; Azura adjusted the single star I use for certainty. Another thread pulled. Another door opened. Another debt quietly added to the ledger I keep under my ribs.

The Knife’s Alliance

Ebonheart’s windows threw a gray light that made every surface honest. Vedam Dren didn’t stand to greet me; men who command tides don’t rise for boats. He let the silence rake me once, then said, “You’ve made yourself heard, Councilor. Now I need you to make others quiet.”

“The Ordinators?” I offered.

“A symptom,” he said, dismissing a whole army with two fingers. “The disease is older. The Camonna Tong.”

He let the name sit between us like a blade on a table.

“They bled in your Shadow War,” he went on, “but bruises don’t break habits. If House Hlaalu is to rise cleanly above Redoran’s spears and Telvanni’s towers, that street-knife must be wrapped in silk—our silk.” His eyes did not blink. “Sheathed when we say. Drawn when we nod.”

“Orvas,” I said, because we were done with prefaces.

A small breath that was not quite a sigh. “My brother,” Vedam answered, and made brother sound like both a memory and a legal burden. “Bring him into the House. Preferably alive.”

He let the next heartbeat pass. “Completely.”

He didn’t explain the arithmetic of mercy and control; he let me hold the contradiction until it balanced: not a head in a sack, but a leash in a drawer.

“Submission or partnership?” I asked in court-cant. (translation: do you want him bent or seated?)

“Results,” he said. “And deniability.”

I studied the map-lacquer on his desk—a coast I knew by the taste of its wind, dotted with red wax where ships become stories. “Parameters,” I said. “What blood can be spilled without making you its author?”

“No public writs. No Temple scandal. No Legion funerals with speeches,” Vedam said, each clause scissored neat. “If a man trips on his own stairs, I will not inquire about carpentry.”

“Coin?”

“A quiet purse,” he allowed, sliding a sealed folio an inch. “Incentives for the right lieutenants. Amnesty for those who can be useful. Not for monsters.” His gaze did not waver. “Trim the worst branches. Do not burn the orchard.”

“And if he refuses the pruning?”

“Then make refusal expensive,” the Duke said, voice even as a ledger line. “Expensive enough that consensus discovers virtue.”

I let that sit. “Temple?”

“Will look away if they don’t have to look up,” he said. “Ordinators are busy inventing heresies. Don’t give them a martyr. The Morag Tong?” A faint tilt of the mouth; he knew I knew better than to answer. “No writ with my name. Ever.”

“House sentiment?” I asked, because storms are easier to sail when you know which way the wind plans to lie.

“Curio smiles too much, but his sums are sound. Hleryn hates what he owes and will pretend he doesn’t. Andas prays over margins and will be persuaded by outcomes that look pious. Atran Oran reads the markets; show him a trend.” He paused. “Dram Bero thinks himself a rumor. Don’t ask him for anything you can’t take.”

The corner of my mouth moved. “Understood.”

The Duke’s hands rested on the chair arms like hilts. “You will be asked—by some—to make an example,” he said, weighing the word. “I prefer a precedent.”

“Precedents are examples that learned to read,” I said.

A thin exhale that might have been approval. “Good. Find Orvas at Dren Plantation. Show him the ledger where survival equals alliance. Offer a retirement he can live to enjoy”—a shadow crossed the word live—“or a future he cannot afford to refuse.”

“And when the blade is ours?” I asked. “Pointed outward,” he said, “and washed where the public can see.”

I nodded once. “One more thing,” I said, shifting back into court-cant’s softer register. “When this is done—cleanly—will the door to Ebonheart open more easily?”

“For those who knock like you? It will remember the sound,” Vedam said, and that was as close to a promise as Dukes make.

We stood together at last—two silhouettes in tempered light. “You were born to different roofs than I,” he said, “but you understand rooms. Keep this one standing.”

“I will,” I said, which in our language means I will try until trying becomes doing.

On my way out I chalked a feather just inside the service door—sky clear; corridor quiet—for the cat who’d follow with papers no one would ever admit existed. Some wars are won by ink that never dries in public.

So: Dren Plantation. Speak to the man who taught knives to walk. Offer him a leash woven from House, coin, and tomorrow. If he takes it, the Camonna Tong becomes a Hlaalu instrument. If he doesn’t, I make refusal expensive until consensus discovers virtue.

“Results,” the Duke had said. “And deniability.” I could give him both.

Orvas Dren 

Dren Plantation lies just beyond Vivec’s southern gates, money disguised as agriculture: rows of neat earth, torches for comfort more than security, guards whose eyes count wagons, not shadows. I shadowed a returning courier through the outer gate, mirrored his pace, and peeled off the moment the torchlight ran out of courage. A gutter downspout, a seam where plaster meets pride, and I was on the main house wall, fingers reading wet stone and old wood for holds.

An open window breathed paper and oil. I checked it with ghost powder—the dust lay still, wardless. Inside, the house smelled of ink and clean knives. Quill-scratch led me along a lamplit hall. I marked a tilted V on the baseboard—no drawn steel—because even truces begin with rules.

Orvas sat in a study that pretended to be modest: low shelves of ledgers, a map with pinholes where ships become rumors, one chair too comfortable for a man who claims to stand all day. Scar traced one cheek like an old signature. His smile arrived late and on purpose.

“Names travel faster than boots,” he said without standing. “Yours runs.”

“Running keeps you warm,” I answered, remaining on my feet. “So does a House with its knives pointed the same way.”

“One knife,” he said, “or a drawer of them?”

“A rack,” I said. “Oiled. Numbered. Accounted.”

That won the first breath that might one day become a laugh.

I spoke of unity the way Hlaalu sells it: a blade turned outward, not inward; a city where sanctioned knives stop looking for Dunmer throats in Dunmer alleys. “Your men are cutting profit out of pride,” I said. “My House prefers both.”

His fingers tapped the desk, counting things I couldn’t see. “My brother’s hand in your back?” he asked.

“It steadied it,” I answered. “But this reach is mine.”

We let the silence do accounting for a count of five. Then I set a chest on his desk and turned the hasp. Ten thousand septims woke in the candlelight—salt, perfume, fear: months of Guild lifts, Hlaalu contracts, skim from pockets that wouldn’t miss their pride until morning.

“For your retirement,” I said, showing no teeth. “Or your renovation. Whichever word lets the Tong keep its face.”

“And the price?” Orvas asked, though the scar on his cheek already knew.

“Structure,” I said. “Routes that pay tax where they should, sleep where they must. No more outlander pogroms that cost House goodwill. No more hiring Fighters Guild fists to settle Tong feelings. You prune the zealots who can’t stop bleeding on the carpet. I point you at problems that wear other colors.”

He turned a page in a ledger that had no writing. “Names?”

“You know them better than I do,” I said. “The cousins who think fear is a currency that never devalues. The ones in St. Delyn who stab first and balance later. The ash-mad veteran in the ascadian dives who hears the Three in his cup and answers with a bottle.”

Orvas’ eyes cooled. “The Ienith boys,” he said at last, not a question. “Bralen Vendu. Old Serethi Turedran who still fights a war no one else remembers.” A pause. “Pruning is messier than it sounds.”

“Then make it look like gardening,” I said. “Transfers to quiet posts. Assignments that never quite come back. A last job on a far pier where the tide runs quick. No public funerals. No martyrs. No speeches for Temple ears.”

He weighed that, then nodded once. “You want the knives pointed outward. Which direction?”

“Redoran blockades. Telvanni customs that charge twice for the same wind. Foreign guilds who think Morrowind is a table without an owner. Leave small traders breathing; they pay taxes. Turn pirates into clients or corpses. And when a House rival buys an out-of-town cutthroat to make a point, the Tong makes a bigger one.”

He let the map keep its secrets and studied me instead. “And the Morag Tong?” he asked, casual as poison. “Old laws. Older pieties.”

“No public writs tied to this room,” I said. “Honor where honor buys peace, not chaos. The Tong and mine know the score; you and I do, too. We keep those understandings separate where it’s useful and together where it’s profitable.”

That was when the smile finally arrived. “Spoken like a man who knows the difference between a contract and a receipt.”

Words are currency; Orvas weighs coin. He slid a folded ledger across the desk—routes, safe rooms, ciphers, ferrymen with two good runs left. “You take the reins,” he said. “I’ll stand where stones don’t fall and speak when your hand needs to be heavier than your face.”

“Verification,” I said, because only a thief remembers to ask. The Skeleton Key coaxed a drawer with the softest click a lie can make. Inside: three contracts bearing seals I recognized, signed by men who would never admit to knowing paper. Fighters Guild payments routed through shell factors. A Temple tithe receipt with a number that meant look away. Proof the Tong wasn’t just knives—it was infrastructure. And now it could be scheduled.

“Conditions,” Orvas said, holding up two fingers. “One: you don’t let the Duke pretend he’s never eaten from my table. Two: you stop your cats from lifting from my fields. I can spare a few sacks for your ferrymen, but I won’t pay twice for the same harvest.”

“Done,” I said. “In return: you stop knifing Argonians and Khajiit on principle. Our House welcomes coin that doesn’t bleed on the counter.”

“The Tong is Dunmer,” he said, testing me.

“So is House Hlaalu,” I returned. “And we’ve prospered by selling to anyone with a purse. Let your pride take its tithe in quiet ways. Let your ledgers take the rest.”

Another long, slow count. Then: “Very well.” He reached for a stylus, wrote three short orders onto thin cedar slats, and sealed them with wax that smelled faintly of bitter resin. “The Ienith cousins transfer to an east-coast ‘opportunity.’ Bralen Vendu discovers faith and leaves for a monastery that has no doors. Turedran retires to fish, where the river is deeper than memory.”

“And the ones who don’t obey?” I asked.

“I will be merciful,” Orvas said, and made merciful an executioner’s term. “I will send them where they cannot embarrass us.”

We shook. The room did not relax. I burned a tiny broken circle under the inner window latch—storm coming if anyone breaks this truce—and palmed his prayer beads from the desk corner not to steal them, but to feel the weight of a habit he’d pretend he didn’t have. Obsidian spheres, threaded with hair. He saw me see them and didn’t move them away.

“One more thing, councilor,” he said as I turned. “If you mean to be the hand on the House, remember: hands get dirty. Make sure the sleeve is worth saving.”

“I brought a spare,” I said.

Outside, the plantation breathed like a beast that had learned a new master’s scent. In my pocket, the Key warmed—a polite lie approving a bigger one. I left with more than a Duke’s errand. I left with an empire of knives that had decided, for now, to point where I pointed—and with Orvas’ promise to prune the worst branches himself, so the orchard could look respectable when the taxmen came to admire the fruit.

The Duke’s Approval

Vedam Dren listened to my report as if he were hearing a weather change: Orvas alive, the Tong aligned, sanctioned death no longer leased against Hlaalu throats. His composure cracked just enough to show the brother under the duke—a small exhale, a softening at the corners of the eyes that men like him only allow in empty rooms.

“My brother,” he said at last, tasting the word. “He agreed?”

“He did,” I said. “On terms he can live with—and that we can work with. He’ll prune his zealots himself. The knives point outward now.”

Vedam’s fingers—always so still on the chair arms—drummed once, twice, and stopped. “He sent no… message?”

“Three cedar slats,” I said, and slid them across the table. “Transfers and retirements. The orchard looks respectable by sundown.”

He turned one slat between forefinger and thumb. “He used to send me driftwood,” he said, not quite to me. “When we were boys. Bits he’d carve to look like ships. Always unfinished.” The ghost of a smile. “I told him I preferred ledgers to toys. He spent a season not speaking to me.”

“He’s speaking now,” I said. “In the language you asked for.”

Vedam nodded. The ripple in his face smoothed into the practiced stillness of office. “You have my full backing,” he said—simple words, expensive meaning. “Go south. Narsis. Vizier Ereven Peronys keeps our heart beating.” A pause, measured and exact. “Win the man who runs the day, and the night will take care of itself.”

“Before I go,” I said, “a courtesy: Orvas will keep his name out of minutes, but he will expect results to look like good governance. I’ll dress them accordingly.”

A faint huff—approval, or something like it. “Dress them in prosperity,” Vedam said. “It flatters everyone.”

“And the Ordinators?” I asked. “They still pace as if every street is a sermon.”

“The sermon will be shorter,” he said. “You’ve given me the pulpit I needed.”

He stood then, not to end the audience so much as to change its register. “Tell my brother…” He caught himself, eyes returning to the cedar slats. “Tell him nothing,” he finished softly. “Tell him we are Hlaalu again, and let the work make the words.”

“As you wish,” I said.

“Nuada,” he added, as I turned. “You understood what I meant by ‘preferably alive.’ Thank you.” The words were dry as parchment and just as deliberate.

“Men are easier to use than monuments,” I said.

“That,” he murmured, “is why you’re useful.”

I left the audience chamber by a side corridor that prefers quiet footfalls, its windows holding the Inner Sea like a polished coin. At the service door, I chalked a feather under the lintel—sky clear, corridor quiet—for the cat who would follow with the paperwork no one ever admits existed. On the bridge, Ebonheart’s lanterns began to unpick the dark, one stitch at a time. South lay Narsis, and a vizier whose ink is said to beat in time with the House.

The voyage would be long. Storms always study men who carry more than one flag. I have weathered worse.

Reflection: Of Night and Shadow

Knives at Velath Morain
Velath Morain sleeps like a cat—with one ear awake. Mine. A wrong breath tugged me out of the shallow part of sleep: not the tower’s sigh, not the river’s teeth, but weight settling where a board doesn’t ever complain. Burbul swore he’d silenced that step.

I rolled off the mattress without moving the blanket, came up in the dark with one dagger in hand and the other still thinking about it. A thumb’s worth of Illusion slid across the door—Silence to teach the hinges manners, a skein of Chameleon to take the edge off my outline. The Key at my ribs warmed as if it enjoyed being near a lock.

The handle turned. Patient. Professional.

I gave him a gift: a palm-sized Sound glamor tossed to the far corner, the soft clink of a bottle where no bottle should be. He took the bait with half a glance, which is more than a professional should spend. I stepped into his blind.

He was fast. Black-leather fast, oil-and-ash fast, the kind of fast that arrives from far away with no footprints. Curved glass in his hand sang toward my throat. I met it with my off-hand, bit the angle, felt poison skitter along my parrying guard like a spider that didn’t get what it wanted. He folded low for my gut; I let Calm bloom in his face for the blink between blinks—his arm went light for the space of a breath—and cut him twice where leather remembers being skin.

He recovered the way trained men do: backward, then right, then high. We traded maps and found we liked the same roads. He almost wrote my epitaph on a diagonal I respected. I wrote his instead—one short line beneath the ribs, another that let his hand forget it was holding anything, and a final punctuation under the jaw in that silent place between pulse and word.

He went down without introducing himself.

Only then did the keep remember to wake. Boots in the passage, a question shouted twice—too loud—and the bar thrown back on the door across the hall. My men arrived armed with guilt. I was already kneeling by the corpse.

The Hand from Cyrodiil
Black-on-black leathers stitched with care, waxed to shed light. The curved dagger: Cyrodiilic glass, edge like honest intention, the tang wrapped in red thread. No Temple writ tucked in a bracer, no House seal, no Camonna Tong sign—just a thin black cord around the neck ending in a charm the color of old bruises: a five-fingered sigil worked small and sure. The Dark Brotherhood.

Rare here. Unwelcome here. The Morag Tong keeps a license on murder in Morrowind, and the Temple defends its monopolies with zeal. Cyrodiil’s black sacrament does not travel openly under the Ghostfence’s shadow.

I found coin in a belt-purse—Imperial mint, recent—two lock shims, a waxed cord, and a tiny vial that had never been opened. No message. No name. Not even a false one. Either they feared search, or they wanted me to know only this much: someone far away thought I should end.

“Lord?” my captain ventured. He looked at the mess and then at me and decided both were his fault. “We were at the second stair—”

“He didn’t come by the stair.” I touched the sill; the soot had been wiped once and only once. “Roof road. North parapet. He lifted the postern pin with a loop and a smile. Burbul’s hinge didn’t squeak because he taught it not to.”

I set the Brotherhood blade on the table, point angled toward the door. “Double the wall. Cut the lanterns by the river—give me shadow outside, light inside. Post one at the cistern and one under the east eave. If anyone asks why, tell them the wind changed.”

When they’d gone, I left three quick marks where only cats would read them: a broken circle low on the outer jamb (storm spent; change route), a feather under the lintel (sky clear—for now), and two stacked chevrons beside the casement (ferryman good for one more run). Then I washed the assassin’s blood from my hands and thought about the absence of a writ.

No Morag Tong paper on the corpse means no Temple blessing on the kill. And if Cyrodiil’s hand is reaching this far, I need a hand of my own that knows these halls better than any outlander syndicate. To find an assassin, become one—legally, ceremonially, with Writs that open doors and close throats. The Tong has been a knife turned to Hlaalu purposes before. It can be a compass now.

That night, sleep was a corridor rather than a fall. At its far end waited two figures, sisters in opposition: Azura, Queen of Dawn and Dusk, her eyes holding the patience of prophecy; and Nocturnal, Mistress of Shadows, gaze sharp and proprietary, her lips crooked in the faintest challenge. The world wore velvet shadow; the air smelled of myrrh and wet stone.

Azura watched my footprints as if she had drawn the path before I walked it—each step a test against a line of fate I only half remember. Nocturnal watched my hands, weighing how surely they move in darkness, how often I choose the lock over the door, the quiet over the clangor. Between them, I was measured, not claimed. Not yet.

In my palm the Skeleton Key pulsed like a living thing. It belongs to Nocturnal—I can feel her pleasure in how I use it, each lock a prayer answered, each seal a vow rewritten. But Azura’s gaze fell on it too, and on me, and I sensed a different arithmetic: not entry, but worthiness. To open is not to deserve.

They did not speak. Or perhaps I have forgotten the words the way one forgets the warmth of a blade after it leaves the sheath. Yet I understood: I am a piece set on a board older than my House, older than my Island, older even than the Tong of knives I now guide. Two hands reached—not to pull me, but to see how I move when watched.

When I woke, the Key lay warm in my grasp, metal humming in a pitch too low for ears and too true to be denied. Outside, the wind changed direction without telling the flags why. Inside, I rolled to sitting, counted my debts, and set my boots on the floor as a man does who knows that dawn and dusk agree on very little—except that he must keep walking.

Knives at Midnight

Tenth Entry – 18th of Last Seed, 3E 427
Location: Vivec, Arena Waistworks & Underworks
“Sanction is the difference between a murder and a message.”

The Door with No Handle
Someone tried to write my ending and forgot to sign it. Not Tong—no Temple writ. An outlander hand. That meant others would want the name as badly as I did.

I pulled my web tight. South Wall cats walked the roof roads and listened where doors have ears; a ferryman on the Odai brought me three whispers and a folded rag that wasn’t a rag. Court-cant said a shipment is overdue ; alley-cant said follow the skein to the Arena . On the underside of the cloth, stitched in charcoal thread, a spider with one leg missing—Mephala’s joke, Morag Tong’s hint.

The entrance was where doors pretend not to be: Vivec’s Arena Waistworks, behind a torn tapestry of a saint whose eyes had been picked out by mildew. I brushed the wall and felt the mortar give like a held breath. Two soft taps, a long, one soft—old guild rhythm—and the panel slid. No hinges. No handle. Only permission.

I left a feather mark under the lintel (sky clear, for those who know feathers) and went down.

The Eyes That Weigh
The Underworks breathed cool and patient. Oil lamps burned low in alcoves; shadows were shaped to see. Men and mer in lacquered chitin watched me arrive without moving. The Morag Tong does not posture; it measures.

I did not bring steel bare. I did not bring lies I couldn’t carry. I brought my names—Master Thief, leash on the Camonna Tong, Council’s rising hand in House Hlaalu—and the assassin’s corpse I had already put in the ground. I let the room smell the truth of them.

A knife-bald mer with a voice like wrapped silk said, “You are not one of us.” It wasn’t a challenge. It was a scale.

“No,” I said. “But someone reached for me with an outlander’s glove. If an unsanctioned blade works in your province, that is your quarrel… and mine.”

The silence turned its head, listening for a lie. None arrived. A nod, then a gesture toward a stair. “Up.”

Eno Hlaalu
Eno Hlaalu, Grandmaster of the Morag Tong, waited in a chamber where sound itself had to ask leave. Old, but not withered; stillness that made other men seem fidgeting. He wore our House name like a quiet threat and a benediction both.

“Nuada,” he said, tasting the syllables. “Street-found at our Council’s door. Now the ruler of thieves, leash of the Camonna Tong, and a hand upon Hlaalu’s ledger.” His eyes did not blink at the titles; they weighed the uses. “You were attacked. Not by us.”

“No writ,” I said, and set the Brotherhood charm on the table between us. “Cyrodiilic work. Your monopoly was insulted.”

“Our faith was insulted,” he corrected, gently. “But yes.”

He let the silence settle like dust on ink. “I can support your hunt. Names turn faster when given, and walls open to sanctioned feet. But the Tong is not a market you buy with coin or an alley you borrow with cant. If you would carry our knife, even for a season, you must let the knife carry you. Reputation, written in three lines.”

“Lines?”

“Writs,” he said, and the word felt like a seal melting. “Proper. Public. Signed and stamped. A governor of tongues who sells slaves he has no right to; a Telvanni factor who kills by bribe instead of duel; and a jealous Hlaalu petty lord whose murders arrive dressed as accidents . Perform them cleanly, and the Tong will call you brother in the dusk —long enough for us to find which foreign hand paid for the insult to our law.”

He was Hlaalu to the bone: offering piety with one hand and policy with the other. The dagger in the dark that writes contracts by candlelight.

The Price of Sanction
He drew out the papers—vellum edged in Temple blue, the red knot of Mephala’s seal pressed so deep the back bore its scar. “You will recite the formula at each death,” Eno said. “You will leave the Writ with the body where eyes can find it. Murder without sanction is rot. Murder with sanction is pruning.”

I read the names. Recognized two. Had already contemplated a third.

“Do this,” he added, softer, “and in return I will make every corridor you need open and every whisper you need to hear grow loose. The Brotherhood are weeds. We will find who watered them.”

He did not ask my fealty. He asked for my work. Very Hlaalu.

First Writ: The Lesson of a Quiet Room
I began the way the Tong prefers—without flourish.

The governor of tongues lodged in a counting-house near the Hlaalu Plaza, four guards whose eyes watched coin, not corners. I walked in as a tax scribe at noon, court-cant and ink under my nails, ledger under my arm. Three brush-passes and a borrowed key put me into his side chamber while he argued tariffs through the wall. The formula came easy in a whisper—“By order of the Morag Tong, sanctioned by Temple and Tradition”—and the dagger came easier. One line under the ribs, one across the argument.

I set the Writ upon the cooling ledger. I left the door open. Some lessons must be public to be learned.

The other two writs took longer—one in fungus-light among Telvanni roots, one on a balcony above Narsis where wind makes a fine witness—but they concluded the same way: with paper on a chest and rumor turning into respect.

The Treaty of Knives
When I returned, Eno did not smile. He inclined his head, and the room breathed out.

“You have a place here,” he said. “Not as one of my sworn—your web already holds too many threads—but as a hand I trust to carry our sanction where sanction must go. While you hunt this Brotherhood, our spies and scribes are yours. Where a door says Temple, we will unlatch it. Where a corner says House, we will turn it.”

“And when I find who paid for the outlander’s blade?”

“Bring me the name,” he said. “If it is Temple business, we will prune it. If it is House business, we will teach it manners. If it is Imperial business… we will decide together.”

The word together had weight. Hlaalu weight.

I left the Underworks with three new routes in my head and a quiet promise in my pocket. In the Waistworks I set a feather under the tapestry’s hem (sky clear; use this door) and a tiny star scratched into the grout at knee-height (cat road only). Outside, Nocturnal kept the alleys honest. Above, the first star of evening found me without effort.

Someone had tried to kill me with a foreign hand. Now the local hands were on mine—steadying, guiding, testing. To find an assassin, I had become one—licensed, lettered, and very visible when I chose to be.

Tomorrow, Narsis would want its due. But tonight, the city and I shared a secret: the next time a blade came from far away, there would be a dozen local knives waiting to greet it.

— Nuada Hlaalu
Master Thief of Morrowind • Leash of the Camonna Tong
Council’s Rising Hand of House Hlaalu
Licensed Brother-in-the-Dusk (by Writ, by Work)
Operative of the Blades (Vvardenfell)
Knife in the Dark