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The fire burns guarded by sheer luck; the wind howls outside the protective walls of timber the copse provides to its windward side, the side downwind shielded high by rockface. It -- and the chill, warded off by the fire's heat -- necessitates their closeness. The men sit three feet apart, loading the weight of the fire circle downwind. The hollow in the rock wall behind them is just enough to hold a modest shelter. It is cozy, almost, if not for the blizzard, if not for the cold.
He's saying something. What is hard to parse; the distraction lies in his speech alone. The words have almost a visual quality when they pour, rounded, from his clever lips, edged by the trim of his neat, dark moustache. He speaks as if speaking the truth into existence, as if breathing life in spoken word. He should have been an orator, but even as a man of the written word, he commands his audience enraptured, leaned forward with elbows on his knees, watching the words fall out. It's some story, but it's always some story; this time one of those that feels distinctly fictitious. It doesn't truly matter. When the author smiles, he bestows his one-man crowd with a flash of perfect pearls and a shimmer in his greyed blue eyes. He is meant to be enchanting, as intoxicating as the warmed mead in his audience's clasped hands.
When he looks up from his drink, the spectator says… something. It's muttered, half-spoken into his mug, something bitter and joking, most likely. It's how it is between them, the quiet undercut of being unimpressed (a hiss of a question, asking why he's been hired, then,) and the author purses his lips and offers a challenge: he asks his companion if he can tell a better tale, then, with all of his apparent stories of travel. It goes untaken, unanswered, called off with a scoff and a noncommittal wave of the hand. It's like a victory; the author smiles, leans back, and watches his captive audience down the rest of his share.
He says he doesn't recall those sorts of stories, that the tales of his own exploits are in memory enigmatic; after all, how is he to tell what seems unusual if a new epic finds him daily? If it's a bluff, it's written off, taken with a smile. He must be lucky, the author says, to live the sorts of stories he only writes about. The sellsword tells him flattery will get him nowhere. The author chuckles darkly.
The noise is catastrophic, a swell of sound in dramatic crescendo, its nature indescribable save for that it must be borne of nature itself — the awful sound stills even the storm and commands attention. The sellsword rises to it, slight frame bristling beneath the material of his cloak, armor stripped, wary and on the offensive. The author insists it’s nothing threatening, nothing that can’t be handled. He manages only a few words before his audience has left the mug by the fire and headed beyond the treeline. Huffing, the author follows.
It is lonely in the Pale, and the land speaks of nothing; even their footprints come quickly covered by the wind-swirled snow. There is naught but the land and the land alone, the scenery quickly devolving into vast wilderness as soon as the lights of Morthal had winked out of view in what must have been ages ago, what could have only been early that morning. They are far enough that the sound remains unheard, close enough to give it cause. Out of the light of the fire, back to the border of its illumination, the sellsword stops. He is shadowed not long after.
From the ripped and gaping maw of its open throat, the steam rises gently, caught by the most ambitious edges of the light. Its glassy eyes shine mirrorlike in the dark, wet and fresh as if the thing could blink at any second, gnash the teeth from its open mouth and bleat a warning. There is no gore upon its budding antlers, only the splatter from the place that once was a neck, night-dark blood fading into the piling snow. Had it an attached body, the flesh would still be warm.
The sellsword stands at the edge of the firelight and regards the stag’s head with a rigid instinct, hand enclosed around the hilt of a blade just-hidden under the thickness of his cloak. He nearly strikes the author, laying a hand upon his shoulder and murmuring something quiet; a pointed finger outstretched plunges into the darkness as he regards the thing just beyond the fire’s reach, the shape just-made-out in the dark. The thing’s body, fifteen feet into the breast of the dark, is pristine. There are no footprints, no marks. Snow begins to build on its tawny fur, the warmth of life fled the scene.
He says something about the waste, of at least harvesting the meat. The author’s hand, cupping the round of his shoulder, assures the sellsword it is best to leave these things be, that no harm will come to them so long as it is left forgotten, disregarded. That he knows, cooing, how awful a waste. That the fire is dying, they should see to it. The deer’s eyes follow their retreat.
He calls it a warning, if not a freak accident; the author is quick to refill the mug with the very last of that bottle, pushes the warmed ceramic into the sellsword’s hands as if to bite back the chill. When the author sits, it is close, the meager heat from his trim frame radiant somehow more than the fire’s. They should take shifts, he suggests, watches — just to ensure nothing comes of it, to ensure nothing is wrong. The suggestion is met with a bitter scoff, a huff through the nose. He calls it antithetical, that it goes against everything he’s been hired to do. It’s only fair, the author argues, and he will take the first shift; the sellsword will not be protected by whom it is he is meant to watch over, but his argument is met with a hand on the jaw, fingers pressed against his flesh as if to force eye contact, as if to force the measure of seriousness:
“You are indispensable to me,” the author says, and the tension between them screams louder than the din of nature itself. Let me do this, he says, but the pressure in his fingertips feels forceful, as if it is no question. The sellsword is silent as concession is forced out of him. The hand that finds itself back to his shoulder slips on its way there, knocks him offbalance and off of the log used as makeshift bench, onto the flame-warmed dirt below; it catches him and stills him in place with a familiar touch. It is close, but it is normal — for he touches to catch attention, and even just last night, holed up in some inn in Morthal, it was the touch he gave to bring him in, to ask under hushed and murmured breath if the author, breath wine-rich, was to be meant to take the pretty young thing on his arm for himself alone that night ——
There is no joke in the matter here, no laughing off a proposition as absurd with the excuse of a bedroom selfishness, not when the broadness of the author’s frame casts its heavy shadow on the sellsword, contrast to the softness in his voice and the touch that pulls him in; he is enchanting until the sellsword finds his face pressed down, heavy condensing breath moistening the heat-dried earth. He is enchanting, and the sellsword is enchanted, and when he realizes that he cannot move, the panic sets in abruptly.
The author asks if it’s clear he cannot take care of himself, pushes his mark down by the chest. His fingers are cold, now, and there is little the sellsword can do, to protest against the gentle trails of coolness that skirt along his hemline, little he can do when they meet flesh and prove their points against his hip. Every muscle lies still and tense. The gentler his whispers get, the closer to his ear, the more insistent they become, and the sellsword cannot even raise a hand to wipe the moisture of the author’s breath from the column of his neck.
The praise is muttered and lavish and slips over his skin like a slime, it locks every fiber into place and stills him entirely through the haze of panic, until even breath is robbed from him. He has seen the work of the author’s needy hands, heard of their exploits, heard them firsthand through paper-thin walls. When they are upon him, there is little a sound that can be made.
The author asks if he thinks he couldn’t take him. If he is perceived as so weak. If he couldn’t take care of it. The hairs of his needle-thin moustache scrape against flesh with every word. The author asks what the sellsword thinks he could possibly be needed for. The fingers press bruises into his jaw. Where his cloak parts, his flesh, exposed, is cold. The cooling lines of spittle chill his neck to freezing where the author does not continue his lavished attentions, and when he smiles, it is pointed against his skin. The author asks what he could possibly think he’s good for. He is warm, too warm, the steady pulse of his heartbeat like a terrible drum. His world is contained in the presses of the author’s fingertips, scorching where they dig into the flesh of his thighs. He burns where their skin meets and freezes without its heat. He repeats himself. Indispensable. The points of his teeth scrape along with the promise of hitting vein, the protrusion of his hips between splayed legs an undeniable presence. He sinks into him, and sinks into him.
It is the same dream as the night before, as it has been every week since the author’s body crumbled.
From the slab of stone he calls a bed, the assassin rises as if it were never a thought.