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It is a lovely evening when the letter comes.
Ashur is silently enjoying the last dregs of daylight on the steps of Balmora’s inn and watching the milling citizens of Vvardenfell below. The wind is calm. The netches call to each other on the outskirts of the city. The air is warm and, for once, without the oppressive odor of ash, the stink whisked away down the Odai River on its bubbling current. It is a quiet and peaceful dusk, something he hasn’t had in a long time.
He gazes at the streets with a lazy interest and swirls his clay mug of sujamma, tilting his head back to observe the sky, when the runner approaches.
It is a fair skinned man, Nord, seen often enough in these parts. “Message for you,” he says, with pitiless brown eyes. “From Elsweyr.” And sure enough, the Queen of Anequina’s seal is stamped upon the heavy parchment, black and sharp and precise.
He has not heard from Queen Khamira since her coronation. He hadn’t expected it, did not feel it was owed; his invitation had come at the hands of one Altmer woman’s specific request. He doesn’t know her. Doesn’t care to. She has no reason to contact him.
Save one.
Ashur does not let the unease creeping through him to show on his face. He simply takes the message from the man’s outstretched hand and nods, hating the weight of expensive paper between his fingers. It is a very official looking letter. He has no desire to open it at all.
The black stone lodged in his gut hardens as he breaks the seal, and Ashur knows what he will see before he reads it. Their only connection resides in that one Altmer woman, the Champion of Anequina. Merilanor. Dragonknight. Fearless huntress and slippery liar, honey-tongued and fierce. Hakoshae hadn’t stood a chance, and neither had he.
It had taken all of three days for her to twist him around her little finger. The flames of her magic seemed to catch wherever she let her gaze linger, and linger they had on him, since she spotted him on that dusty road. He’d teased her about it relentlessly, and now her initials are stamped at the bottom of a veritable trove of letters stored in a box under the floorboards beneath his bed. Two for every month. She never fails to write, just as verbose in ink as she is in person. Last he had heard, she was headed to Glenumbra. Daggerfall, he thinks.
She’d said she missed him. Balmora is quickly becoming a priority, she’d told him. Do you have any silt striders?
The assassin shakes out the Queen’s missive and grinds his teeth. There is ice settling in his veins, and he hasn’t read a single word yet; he wants to shake some sense into himself, snap to get a grip! He fights not to swallow against his nerves.
Serjo Ashur of the Morag Tong,
It is with great regret that I must inform you of the death of--
His hands clench. Balmora screeches to a sickening halt.
The papers crunch noisily, heedless.
The world around him feels suddenly frozen, still and void and mocking in its loveliness. There is even fucking birdsong above him, and Ashur cannot breathe against the sudden vice squeezing around his chest. Sorrow surges in his throat in a whitewater rush and he works his jaw, tamping it back down, swallowing the pounding grief roaring in his ears. It cannot be. It cannot.
He opens his hands. A painful breath shudders out of him, and it feels as though it is dragged through glass. He wills his fingers not to tremble as he smoothes the paper open once more.
--my Champion, Merilanor of Auridon. She has fallen to the machinations of Mannimarco and his Worm Cult.
Khamira’s penmanship is shaky, he notes distantly. It is like he is watching himself from afar.
I wish to offer my heartfelt condolences. She spoke to me often of you, and always with favor. It seemed only right to inform you personally; for what it’s worth, I grieve with you. She was a dear friend to me, and I shall miss her greatly.
We were unable to recover a body. It was only through... a reliable source did we learn of her demise. He says he can feel her across the Veil. In Coldharbour.
Jone and Jode, I am so sorry.
I wanted to hold her rites here, in Rimmen. She had many friends and they wish to pay their respects. There will be a ceremony in three month’s time, to allow for your travel. The twenty-fifth of Sun’s Height.
He shuffles the pages, not seeing a single word. There is a second, and the third-- a deed. Her home in Rimmen.
“N’chow,” he spits, and his head aches. She’d left him-- He couldn’t possibly--
I do not know what your people do for the loss of a… partner. I do not know your customs, and if there is anything you would like to perform, or have said, it shall be. She did not divulge specifics, but…
I know she loved you. Whatever comfort that may bring.
Moons guide you,
Khamira
He lets the pages flutter to the stone steps beside him without a word or sound. It is like he has suddenly been struck blind; he knows there is sunshine, there are people and animals going about their merry way around him, but his entire focus has narrowed to a single, wretched point.
Merilanor is dead.
Ashur clenches his jaw, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes.
Merilanor is dead.
The thought is so completely absurd it seems almost surreal. She cannot be dead. It is impossible. He’d seen her himself, wreathed in flame with dancing fingers and shimmering red hair. He’d watched her drag herself up the steps of that fucking Moon Gate, half dead and smiling, shoved along by that old mage and promising to “Be back in a jiffy, Ashur!” She hadn’t let him down then, and he refuses to believe she would do it now. Not after everything, after the lengths they’d gone to survive the Three Banner War, the secrecy, the worry. She wouldn’t do this to him. She wouldn’t.
The boulder in the pit of his stomach tells him otherwise, and his temples throb with the effort not to howl into the setting sky. He knows with a chilling, irrevocable sort of certainty that she--
Ashur snatches the deed to her house from where it has fallen beside him, forcing his eyes to focus on the words written in her elegant hand. It is more than just a land title, he realizes. It’s her will.
He cannot do this.
Just as he is about to ball the offending scrap of paper up and toss it into a lava pit, it is plucked from his hands by slim fingers. He cannot will himself to chase after it, and tries to speak past the knot in his chest without any sort of success.
“Well, well,” Naryu Virian says above him, and Ashur stiffens. “Look what we have here.” The Dunmer woman dangles the will in front of his face like a teasing sort of toy, and he thinks he might be sick. “An unexpected windfall, my dear? Are we suddenly wealthy beyond our wildest dreams?”
“Naryu,” Ashur hisses, his voice low and shaky, “Stop.”
“Always so serious.” There is a beat of silence as she scans the letter. “My, my! I was only joking, but it looks like I wasn’t far off the mark. Hardly surprising.” He can hear the smirk in her voice, and he has never wanted to violently harm someone more than he does now. “Who had to die for you to get so lucky, hm?”
He has surged to his feet and whirled to face his colleague before he has even thought to move. “Shut up,” he snarls, the edges of his vision clouding over in red and he wants to die. “Give me the… the--”
“Use your words, darling.”
The point of his dagger beneath her chin wipes the playful humor from her eyes, and they flash dangerously. “I said,” he seethes, “Shut. Up.” His eyes burn, and he blames it on the non-existent ash. “Give it to me.”
“All you had to do was ask.”
“Fuck off, Naryu,” he says, hating the tremor in his voice because he knows she hears it. “It’s none of your business.”
“Since when have you ever known that to stop me?” She doesn’t fight him when he snatches the will from her dangling fingertips. He has turned from her and is bundling the rest of the papers together when she chirps, “Who is Merilanor?”
Ashur flinches. He bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood, and feels all the breath leave him in a sudden whoosh.
“That isn’t a Dunmeri name.”
It takes a long several seconds for him to answer. Ashur tenses, wanting to clench his hands into fists and grind his teeth and scream into the quiet dusk, but he knows it will do nothing but tear open the gaping wound in his chest even further. So, instead, he sags, slumping against the railing of the inn’s porch, and whispers, “No. It’s not.”
Naryu has the sense not to push, so she waits for him to take a deep breath, squeezing his eyes shut and pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. It does nothing to relieve the pressure behind his eyes, nothing to lessen the sting behind his lids, and he says, “She is -- was a High Elf.”
He feels her come to stand beside him. She does not touch, merely leaning over the railing and staring down into the streets below. “Dominion?”
“Yes.” He swallows. “An Eye of the Queen. And… Champion of Anequina.”
“Fancy titles.” Naryu shoots him a sharp look out of the corner of her eye. “I didn’t think you had such poor judgement.”
He cannot argue that because it is true, so instead, he spits a sharp laugh down at his feet. “Wouldn’t that I had your sage guidance at the time.”
“And any other.” When he looks at her, her face is uncharacteristically soft. Ashur cannot say she is a gentle woman, or even a soothing one, but she knows the power of words well enough. “You met in Elsweyr, then? On your last trip?”
“No.” He watches one of her eyebrows shoot upward. He swallows hard. “The one before it.”
He doesn’t need to look at her to see the surprise sweep across her visage. “That was two years ago, Ashur.”
“I’m perfectly aware.”
But Naryu doesn’t let it go. “Two years? How did you… what did you do? I never saw an Altmer so much as float by on a ship!” Her red eyes narrow at him, boring a hole in the side of his face. He feels his jaw clench, and he grinds his teeth so hard he nearly tastes the fine dust on his tongue. “What did you tell her? About the Pact?”
“Why does it have to be about the Pact?” Ashur spits, whipping to face her. “I know you don’t care about the war, and I even less!” His heated stare drills into her own, unflinching. “It’s because she was Altmer then, is it? Not one of us, so she must be unworthy, and I traitor for --” And he falters, desperately trying to continue, but the vice wrapped around his heart has slithered into his throat, and he finds he cannot breathe, choking on the raw grief that pounds through his veins.
It takes him a while to recover his composure. Naryu’s face is grey with… something. He isn’t sure what, and he doesn’t care enough to find out.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Ashur finally croaks, watching his friend as his vision begins to blur. “She’s dead.” This time, he does crush the sheaf of papers in his hands, and the finality of the noise is enough to wrench that strangled gasp from his chest. “She’s dead.”
“You loved her.”
“Yes.”
And Ashur weeps.