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Lilliandra works with quiet focus as she coaxes a wire-fine thread of magic through a joint. On the table between them, bones click and settle: bird keel, reptile vertebrae, the thin radius of something once fast. A skull like a question mark waits off to one side, its teeth too delicate for menace. She hums under her breath; a small tune she uses when aligning sigils in her head.
“Hold this?” she asks, and nudges a splay of ribs toward him with the back of her hand.
He steadies the little cage of bone, two fingers lifting, two bracing. There is an elegance to her necromancy that he wouldn't have admired in anyone else — but in her, now, it is almost fond. The sternum clicks into place; she breathes, and the whole thing shivers like a bird about to settle its feathers.
“What was Skyrim like?” she asks, casual as if asking for a tool. The words land light and sink. She doesn’t look up; she loops, tightens, draws a sigil in the air with one fingertip to stitch the magicka through the vertebrae. The spell makes a wet, paper-thin sound, like pages turning underwater.
Miraak says, because something must be said, “Cold. Stone. Wind.”
She huffs, amused without cruelty. “You’re a poet.”
Her hands keep working. She leans closer to check alignment, hair slipping forward until a strand nearly brushes the construct’s ribs. He smells chalk, hot metal, the ghost-salt scent of preserved bone. The thing on the table is taking on a shape that is not dragon, not bird — a child’s sketch of both, refined by an adult’s ruthless precision. He understands why she is making it. He does not say so.
He knows the mountain passes by name, the old borders of the Holds before later redivisions, the cult-temple sites in a constellation across the map. He knows the heights of their walls, the tilt of their altars, the proper ash mixtures for etching stone so the runes would endure. He can list the tributaries that feed the Karth, the tax ledgers that recorded grain yields, the grave-goods typically found beneath cairns for a provincial class none of them would have called “middle.” He knows this because books here told him, and he remembers books perfectly.
Out loud, he adds, “It was harsh,” and hears how little there is in it. A single word trying to hold an entire sky.
“Many places are harsh,” she says, noncommittal, the way she pokes at him when he’s being evasive and she doesn’t yet know it’s not about her. She lifts the skull at last and lowers it over the waiting spine. A bit of magicka and the little thing tilts, finds its seat with a neat, satisfied click.
He reaches for more. A hallway of dressed stone; a bowl of incense on a simple altar, fragrance thin and sharp; a winter dawn violet above a ridge of rock and fir. A dragon’s wingbeat like cloth snapping full—
Ink wicks in. The memory takes on the gloss of Apocrypha’s light, and the incense is replaced by the tang of treated parchment. The dressed stone acquires a seam like a book spine. The ridge of rock in his mind sprouts shelves along its crest. The wingbeat becomes the long exhale of paper resettling, somewhere deeper in the stacks. The more tightly he holds, the more the edges print themselves.
“Lilli,” he says, because buying time with her name is an old habit. “Why this?”
She smiles down at the tiny construct. "Curiosity, as usual." She shrugs, not looking at him. “Because your papers give me the bones. I want muscle.”
A flash: knee on cold stone. The ache is real for half a heartbeat — pressure, weight, the sense of a body younger than this one — and then some memory-moth flutters through and eats the edges. The stone becomes smooth paper under his palm. The ache becomes the persistent cramp he gets from writing too long.
He can recall anger vividly — it had weight; it has weight. He can recall the pressure of an audience of dragons above and the obligation to perform belief. He can recall the white-cold pride that is not quite joy. But where faces should be, the ink lifts and blots them out. Where the temple’s floor should have the faint grit of ash, his mind gives him the smooth drag of vellum beneath a quill.
“Miraak?” Lilliandra’s voice is mild. He realizes he’s paused with his hand still steadying the ribs as though they might fall without him. “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so. I can always look up a travelogue and sift the propaganda out.”
The offered out is reasonable. The offered out flays.
He sets the ribcage down with care and withdraws his hand. “Then use them,” he says, too flat. The little construct flexes infinitesimally, a sympathetic tremor running along the wire through its spine. “They will know more of Skyrim than I do.”
Her head finally jerks up at his tone; in that instant he sees it — the misread slotting into place, annoyance pricking like static. “All right,” she says, crisp. “Consider it withdrawn. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”
The air changes as the Tower notices strain: a shelf several levels up exhales and settles; a long chain of hanging lamps pivots one degree out of alignment, as if trying to listen better. He feels the realm shift its weight around them.
“It isn’t—” he starts and can’t bear the rest. The explanation would require confessing the hole. It would require saying I cannot tell you the difference between what I lived and what I have read and watching her make a scholar’s face at it, even if the scholar’s face is the kind one. He stands instead. The chair’s legs make a modest sound on stone.
“Where are you going?” Lilli asks, not soft, not hard, just taking inventory the way she always does.
“Somewhere the books are quiet,” he says, which is either a joke or the truest thing he can manage.
He leaves before the little bone dragon opens and closes its jaw for the first time, before Lilli can decide whether to be irritated, worried, or both. Behind him, the Tower is very polite about rearranging itself to allow his exit, and the sound of pages turning follows like a tide.
He takes the stairs that lead nowhere, then the narrow walkway that pretends to be a balcony. The Tower obliges him a slice of quiet: a pane of fogged glass facing the ink sea, a stone bench, the sound of lamps ticking as they cool. He sits and does nothing on purpose. Not a meditation — he refuses to grant it the dignity — just stillness until the thoughts lose their teeth.
The Tower shifts, polite. A chain of lamps straightens a fraction; somewhere far off, a book returns itself to a different shelf. He pretends not to hear the realm making room for his sulking.
After a while, footsteps. Familiar cadence; the carefulness of someone who knows sound carries. He doesn't need to guess when her magic always precedes her. She stops at the threshold, gauges the weather of him, and, rare as rain in a vault, says nothing. The quiet lengthens. It's almost a kindness.
She crosses the space the way she approaches dangerous things: steady, without the courtesy of a warning cough. When she sits close, he nearly flinches. She leans in instead of away, and slowly her head comes to rest against his shoulder. He feels the catch and release of her breath. No questions. No names for what this is.
He can almost appreciate her silence. Almost. Then envy arrives, salt and neat: her memory that still has texture, that hasn’t been reprinted until it shines too smooth to hold. Her recollections of Summerset have smell, heat, music — he remembers the things she's told him. The warmth of afternoon light in a courtyard, the exact chill of a marble floor on bare feet at night. He wants to be angry at her for keeping what he bartered away, except that would require believing either of them had a choice.
“Lilli—” he starts. Stops. The name is too much and too little.
She shifts. He thinks she’ll pull away. Instead, she lowers the thing in her hands into his lap: the bone construct. Ribs like a cupped palm, bird-keel and reptile spine, the small skull balanced on wire and will. It clicks once — tiny, eager — and then settles, as if it understands ceremony.
“I brought him so you wouldn’t have to look at me,” she says, still not lifting her head. Then, almost apologetic, as if she doesn't know what to say, she adds, “I finished the jaw.”
He stares down at the hinge she’s made, the clever pin of copper tucked inside like a secret. The little thing’s muzzle opens and closes with a faint, dry promise. It is not a dragon and never will be. It resembles one because she wanted it to, and because she knows what he is to her even if she will not embroider the word.
“You made this,” he says, uselessly.
“For you,” she says, without drama. “Well, not for you. Because you matter, and my hands know how to say that faster than my mouth.”
He almost laughs, except the sound would be a crack. “I lied,” he says, and feels the relief of a blade set down. “Not with intent, but I began to tell you what Skyrim looked like and realized I was reciting someone else’s memory with my voice.”
She's very still against his shoulder. “I thought you were avoiding me,” she says plainly. “That I’d been careless and you were offended. I didn’t think you couldn’t.”
“I can tell you the number of steps in a temple I served,” he says, eyes still on the little skull. “I can tell you the mixture for the incense we burned and the rate at which the smoke should curl if the draft is correct. I can tell you the page in the treatise where it is written. Ask me how the stone felt under my knees and my mind hands me vellum.”
“I would take your fiction,” she says after a moment. “If that’s what you have. I’d rather have your invention than someone else’s certainties.”
He can imagine it: fabricating a childhood with her — pine resin and river-stone and balconies that never existed — just to have something they could share. The temptation is obscene. It would be a kindness and a desecration in the same breath.
He lets the envy pass through his chest without lodging. “If I give you the story, Apocrypha will bind it,” he says quietly. “It will be truer on paper than it ever was in me. And then what little is left will have to compete with a better version.”
She considers that like she considers a problem of numbers. “Then don’t write it,” she says. “Say it here where the Tower can only eavesdrop.”
He huffs, and the sound is almost human. “The Tower hears everything with teeth. And it does not change the fact that I am a creature of Apocrypha more than I am Skyrim's son.”
A long pause. Then, in her smallest voice — the one she uses when she's unsure of herself — “I didn’t mean to pry, if that helps.”
He nods, once. It does. Not enough, but it does.
They stay like that. Time does whatever it does here; the lamps tick, the shelves adjust, something vast turns in the fog outside and does not bother them. The bone dragon opens its jaw again, testing the world for the possibility of sound and finds none.
He lifts his hand and rests a fingertip against the skull, as if to bless or steady it — he doesn’t know which. The copper pin gleams.
His voice, when it comes, is careful, like crossing a rotten bridge. “What was Skyrim like?” he asks because she won’t ask again. He feels her breath catch against his shoulder.
“Cold,” he finally says. “Harsh. And very, very far away.”