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It’s not hatred, not exactly.
She simply thinks the belt offensive to all reason.
It’s large, bulky, and sharp. It’s as wide as her hand spread out and cruelly lays at the exact angle to jab into his ribs whenever he leans over a table — which he did often. Ceremonial, he’d said once, as if that excuses the lunacy of its poor design. She’d seen Dwemer armour less excessive. Watching him work had become an exercise in second-hand discomfort.
Lilliandra endured many things in Apocrypha: the dripping annoyance of the ink, the taste of metal in her mouth after too much spellwork, even Miraak’s tendency to leave half-translated tablets scattered like breadcrumbs. But the belt is too far.
So, when the opportunity comes, she finally takes it.
He had left his outer robes on the arm of a chair, the monstrous belt laying over it. She eyes it a moment, then exhales as though making a hard decision. With two fingers, she lifts it as far from her body as possible. “Abomination,” she mutters under her breath. The buckle clinks a noise like protest. “Dramatic,” she says, and carries it between two fingers down the hall and onto the balcony as though escorting a venomous specimen to disposal. The ink seas have received many things from her: mistakes, first drafts, the occasional rival’s thesis, unneeded bodies. The belt goes in with satisfying immediacy, dragged under by the black surface without a ripple, as if the realm itself refuses to reflect it.
Days pass before he mentions it.
That alone delights her — proof that the belt was neither essential nor functional, only symbolic. And symbols, she believes, are made to be reinterpreted. The absence of it suits him. He moves easier now, bends without that metallic scrape, looks marginally less absurd. The improvement is empirical.
When he finally says, “I can’t find my belt,” she’s halfway through cataloguing a new runic correlation.
“Misplaced it?” she asks without looking up.
“Apparently.”
“Tragic.”
The quill scratches on. He waits for more, for the faintest inflection of guilt or curiosity, but she gives him nothing — only the calm rhythm of ink on parchment. He sighs, mutters something about the realm devouring his belongings. He disappears and reappears like a poorly managed spectre — into the bedroom, to the hall, back again. He opens a cabinet as if the belt might have folded itself neatly inside. He checks on top of a bookcase. At some point, he lifts a cushion and looks beneath it, as though the belt is a shy animal with a fondness for upholstery.
Lilliandra doesn’t smile, not yet. Instead, she lets him be. He has rituals for losing and rituals for admitting loss, and they are not the same.
She finally gets a replacement for him: supple leather, thinner than the old monstrosity, double-stitched, and more importantly, a buckle that will not gouge. She adds enchantments she knows would benefit him and leaves it on the corner of his desk without comment, folded with almost ceremonial neatness. No note, no explanation. Only the faint shimmer of well-made spellwork visible when the light hits at a particular angle.
By evening, it’s gone. By morning, he’s wearing it.
He doesn’t thank her — he never does. But she catches it anyway: the small, unconscious way his hand drifts across the belt as he walks, fingers brushing the smooth edge as though the body itself acknowledges a comfort the mind refuses to credit her for.
One night, he finally confronts her. “You meddled,” he says.
She doesn’t even try to hide it and only tilts her head. “I improved.”
He considers the line between those two words. It is thin as a hair and as strong as wire. “You threw it away,” he adds, finally naming it.
She does not blink. “I removed a hazard from my laboratory.”
“My belt.”
“A hazard,” she repeats, unkind to the grammar of ownership. Then, softer, because victory wins more if it doesn’t crow, “You were miserable in it, and refused to admit it. I solved the problem.”
“I had grown accustomed to the weight.”
“Then keep this,” she says. “And misplace the memory.”
They stand in the hum of the Tower’s attention. He could fight — declare autonomy, seize back his relic, force the realm to cough up some charred, ceremonial parody of himself. Or he could accept the softness pressed into the edges of things when she is around. It is not surrender so much as a reallocation of variables.
He adjusts the belt a hair tighter. “It’s tolerable.”
She smiles. “High praise.” As he sits to finally join her, she adds, as if remembering something trivial, “If you do misplace this one, I’ll assume it was deliberate.”
“If I misplace it,” he says, “it will be because someone improved it out of existence.”
“Then we understand each other.”
They do.