_{Schafting Hank in a Storm}

---

Joy wasn’t particularly athletic.

She could dance. She could move through a tavern and sing until her voice was hoarse and her breath gone — cheeks red and feet sore, sure. Her Nord spirit burned in her blood, giving her determination that many lacked, but grit and determination really only took a person so far when they lacked any kind of skill…

As she walked, she mused on the first night at the Loyal Hound. She and Janus bonding over empty promises of lessons and songs. Neither felt so empty now, not after the fire, and certainly not since the stars went out.

So Solomon had made a promise to the man. A promise to keep her safe, and Janus had agreed to help. There wasn’t a lot holding her back from feeling entirely like the group's absolute burden. If she hadn’t spent so many years feigning and eventually nurturing a feeling of worth then she wouldn’t have found that legitimate place of self-assured confidence. Joy might have had skills that the others did not, but she was lacking in what they all shared, which was the ability to really defend herself.

With a sigh, she continued through the cold bowels of the keep, hoping that Henry would be along soon too. The Nord felt a pull towards the younger Breton, a desire to protect him in a way that swords and shields could not. Her hands were empty and fidgeting, anxious for something to hold. She clasped her fingers at her side, moving between a closed fist and splayed fingers over and over, in time with her quiet steps.

The warm, flickering flame from inside the training room was inviting as it spread out its light across the dark stone floor, and upon rounding the corner she made out the shape of the tall Colovian, busting himself with the weapons and tools. Joy was glad it was him, Janus had a way of putting her at ease and something made her believe that she had a similar effect on him too. It was as if they were just two similar spirits — wanderers, as he’d said. From the doorway, she gave a gentle wave and spoke out into his contemplative silence. “So... Suppose I’ll be getting that lesson after all then.”

Janus looked up from the task of running a whetstone over his menagerie of blades long and short. The newest addition, he dare not call it a replacement, was on the table before him enjoying the honing it was getting. Letting steel sit in a dank chamber of a castle was no way to maintain its edge, and so Janus busied himself with honing it.

He smiled his easy smile to see Joy in the doorway, her voice always something nice to hear. Like birdsong, but the thought of putting her hands to use for the killing work, it troubled him, “Seems you will.” He said through a fading smile, “Only waiting for Henry now. We’ll be taking the lesson to the battlements, first thing.”

Propped in the corner next to him were three training blades made from wood. A similar weight and balance to the real things, but none of the sharp edges. He picked one up by the blade and offered it to Joy, “My pa used to tell me defending the home, sewing and reaping the crops that’re sown, providing for the family is man’s work.” He held onto the blade even as Joy took it by the hilt, “Ma said that once the men sod off to war, everything becomes women’s work.”

Janus let go of the blade and let Joy have it, walking to his table and putting away all of his blades, “You have me for the next two weeks, seems.”

“Your ma sounds like an enlightened woman,” Joy replied with a slight smile, holding the sword in her own hand as she took several small steps forward with it, holding it up to give it a careful examination. “Two weeks?” She asked, stopping in her tracks to pass the examination to him.

“All it takes to master the blade enough?” The woman gave a slow nod. “Two weeks of training,” she sighed, waving the sword to cut slowly through the air. “Then you’re gone?” There was no disappointment in her voice, but she did raise a brow at him. “You’re going to train us enough in two weeks? So me an’ Henry can win this war single handed.” She chuckled at herself, swinging again with the training sword before carrying on with her humourous tale. “Then once we’re declared the heroes of the realm… I have to waste my time tracking you down over all’a Tamriel, just to finally get my drink?”

Henry appeared in the doorway, a diminutive shape in the stone arch and the flickering light. Bruno’s axe looked too big for his hands. “M-mister Janus, miss Joy,” Henry greeted them, his voice flimsy with trepidation. He’d never fought anyone before and his anxiety had grown with each step that had brought him closer to the training room. He quickly looked away from the hulking Colovian to Joy’s kindly face and that brought him some comfort.

After swallowing away his fear, he entered the room proper and joined Joy’s side, glancing at the wooden sword that she held. It immediately made him feel stupid for bringing the axe. Of course they weren’t going to train with sharp steel. Henry cleared his throat awkwardly and held the axe behind his back instead, as if removing it from sight meant that it was no longer there. “So… uhm, what now?”

“We go to the battlements.” Janus said simply, passing them on his way out, “Bring the axe if you like, but we ain’t using it.”

The walk to the battlements was a quiet affair. Janus wasn’t keen on making small talk it seemed, lost in thoughts that were far away from the here and now maybe. Training these two reminded him of Skyrim, putting swords in the hands of young men and women, putting a leash around their heroism. Weaponizing their sense of justice and country. This wouldn’t be too different.

When they made their first steps on the battlements, Janus’ boots scuffing on the stone, he turned to them and looked the two in the eye in turn. “If I had ten septims for every person I’ve seen killed by being tired in a fight, well,” Janus pursed his lips, “Reckon I’d have plenty septims. Learning a thousand moves won’t do nothing if your lungs are snatched away at the fifth.”

He nodded down the length of the battlements that circled the entire castle, “Run. Two laps around.”

Joy listened. Focusing enough on Janus’ voice that she could ignore the bleak darkness that was spread over the grounds now. She would have to find a way to remind herself of the colours. He was suddenly so serious too, Janus. That slow and painfully quiet shuffle out of the building. This was all so foreign.

There was no time to think about it, and instead she reached for Henry’s hand, giving him an encouraging squeeze. “Another race?” She said to him, flashing him a bright smile before she let go, and set off steadily in a forward direction. “Last one back is the rotten egg,” she laughed over her shoulder. When she turned forwards again the smile disappeared and strain cursed her face. Her lower lip began wavering as she chugged forward carefully. This was going to hurt, she knew it. Her chest already felt hot with it but she had to lead the way for Henry. Be the example that this was fine and normal.

Henry was used to long days of hard work so he wasn’t terribly out of shape, but running wasn’t something he did particularly often. He was almost glad to be running now, though, because it meant he didn’t have to look at Janus for a moment. The big man scared him now. Not because of anything Janus said or did specifically, but because of how serious and intimidating he was. Henry wasn’t like that at all. Was he going to have to learn how to become like Janus in order to become a good fighter? It seemed impossible.

But he took a deep breath and followed after Joy. This he could do. One step at a time. Quite literally, he thought, as his feet bounded over the stone battlements. He decided to keep pace with Joy instead of trying to surpass her, even though his developing man’s body would probably allow him to, despite her challenge. They were in it together. He didn’t want to have to compete with Joy too.

Janus watched them go with folded arms, disappearing behind the castle itself when they got far enough and emerging from the other side. They’d kept a steady pace at first, but by the time they’d skidded to a halt in front of Janus at the last lap, they looked like he’d made them run the entire breadth of High Rock. Whatever he could give them in two weeks was enough, Janus reminded himself, they weren’t expected to be soldiers. He looked at them and grasped up two of the blades, tossing one each to them before he pushed off from the battlement to stand, “Back to the training room, we’ve still got drills to run.”

The Nord barely caught the sword. Her slender legs wobbled under her, and each deep breath burnt her from her throat to her stomach, ringing loud in her chest. Before the blade was able to drop completely, she wrapped a hand around it, taking as firm a grip as she could manage. “Come on Henry,” she wheezed out, following after Janus.

The boy was out of breath too. The first lap had gone well enough, but his lack of running stamina really showed itself in the second lap and he merely nodded, panting as he wiped the sweat from his brow. It was a sobering reminder that despite his hard work, his life had been altogether pretty soft. And now they still had to swing their swords! Henry resolved to start each day with a lap or two around the battlements from now on.

Luckily for Janus, the training room had its own wooden dummies to practice on. There was no point in teaching them counters and slips, ripostes and other sorts of fancy swordplay if they couldn’t even grasp the basics yet. He nodded to Henry, offering his hand out for his practice blade. He snatched it out of the air and stepped up to the boy, “Be still,” he said, “With every edged weapon there are nine basic directions of attack.”

He slowly drew the blade horizontally across Henry’s stomach one way and the other, “One and two,” then across his left shoulder down to his right hip and back, “Three and four, and so on. Once you understand that, you are able to block, and then to parry, and then to riposte.”

“But I don’t expect you to be masters in a day.” He handed Henry the training blade and pointed to the dummies, “I want you to work the muscles in your sword arm, get used to feeling the impact of a blade against something.”

He folded his arms and sat down on the table next to his weapons he’d left, “Any questions?”

Henry didn’t have any. He looked at the sword in his hand and then at the dummy. The training weapon was only wood and the dummies weren’t people. He could do this. But as Henry lifted the sword over his head and prepared to bring it down diagonally across the dummy, one of the cutting angles that Janus had demonstrated on him, he stopped. Familiar faces flitted across the featureless visage of the burlap sack that stood in for the dummy’s head. Farmers and butchers and milk maids; people that Henry had known in life and feared in undeath. Could he strike a zombie down that wore a friendly face?

The boy bit his lip and clenched his empty fist. They surely wouldn’t hesitate -- they were just corpses, their minds gone. With a strangled cry, Henry slashed the sword in a downwards strike but it bounced from the dummy’s surprisingly sturdy torso and the hilt fled from his hand, sending the wooden blade scattering away across the stone floor.

From where Henry was standing, clutching his bruised fingers and wounded pride, it looked just like a toy.

Scolding himself, he cast his gaze down at his feet, as was his custom when he expected a reprimand. Mister Antabolis would reprimand him for this, for sure. He always did when Henry had been clumsy or careless. “Stupid,” the boy whispered.

Watching carefully as the wooden practice piece dropped, Joy immediately clapped her hands together. She could see the forlorn expression in the boy’s eyes and decided it was pointless dwelling on that. Instead she scampered over to go and collect his dropped sword. “That was too strong, Henry,” she said quietly as she brought it back to him, slipping a finger under his chin to lift his head again. “But we have time to perfect our technique yet. We’re not masters in a day. You can do it,” she smiled encouragingly.

“At least now I know to avoid that style,” the Nord added with a wink taking to the dummy herself. Her own efforts weren’t much better. She kept a hold of the sword, but flinched at the vibration that ran through the wood and met her palm.

Janus stopped himself from going for Henry’s sword as he saw Joy pick it up and offer it back to the lad. He nodded to himself, Joy had it, that spirit of being a link in the chain. The weakest one would shatter the lot, but only if you let it. If he let himself be callous and abrasive while he was shivering in the wilds of Skyrim surrounded by insurgents he’d trained, they’d have gotten nowhere.

You had to be a leader, know when to be soft and when to dig into the men under you. Henry was in good hands, but he was still afraid that Joy was all soft. Until she started running through the cutting drill with a purpose while Henry moved through the motions like a man without heart. Opposites of each other. He unfolded his arms and walked between the two, his eyes going to Henry first, limply batting at the dummy with forlorn eyes, already so sure of his failure at a task that wasn’t even graded.

“You think if that dummy was a man he’d be waiting patiently for you to tickle him with that sword of yours?” Janus quirked a brow as Henry looked to him, “Lucky for you it ain’t swinging back. Take your time, swallow your ego, boy. Lucky for us we can all afford to make mistakes in here. Learn from them.”

“And you,” Janus turned to Joy still wailing away at the dummy like she was trying to chop it down, “Slower. A fight ain’t like chopping down a tree, swinging at it until you’re done. It’s chess. You’ll tire yourself out before we’re even half way done here, and we’re not stopping for either of your convenience.”

“Horseman didn’t.” He pointed to the pale scar on his brow, a reminder of the night they’d had that brought them all together. “You gotta calculate the swing, it’s a sword, not a mace. Might end up slapping them in the head with the flat of the blade instead of taking it off his shoulders.”

He spun on his heel and went back to his place at the table, “Go again,” he spoke with a sternness, “Get better.”

---

“Stop.”

Janus’ voice shot through the room like thunder after the lengthy time of nothing but the clacks of wood on wood. By now, they were both lightly tapping the dummies and had worked up a sweat. They’d feel it in their arms come next morn, and their raw palms. Janus would never forget the feeling of not being able to use his hand without it hurting after those long days of practice. Even now he was massaging his sword hand’s palm with a thumb at the memory of it. “Leave your swords on the rack.”

Janus looked each of them over, letting them paint their own thoughts into his gaze as he sat with them in silence. Finally, he spoke again, “How do you both think you did?”

“I think we did just fine,” Joy answered, placing the sword back in its place with care. Clearing her throat, she cast a glance to Henry and gave him another wink. “It wasn’t so bad for our first time,” she remarked with a light and airy giggle before giving the Breton’s shoulder a tender rub.

Henry smiled quickly at Joy, grateful for her reassurance and her support, before looking back at Janus and nodding to reaffirm what she had said. Truthfully, Henry felt like he had performed badly. He couldn’t imagine a seasoned warrior starting out like he had just done. If there was path from the weak boy he was now to a strong man like Janus, Henry couldn’t see it. But he didn’t want to let Joy down. His best was all he could do.

“It… was a start,” he said tentatively, almost mumbling -- so quiet was his voice. “At least I didn’t drop the sword anymore at the end of it.” Henry laughed nervously.

“Then that’s a lesson taught and progress made,” Joy said encouragingly.

Janus looked from Joy to Henry, at the boy’s downturned eyes that refused to meet his. He was like that once, until a little Redguard boy made him bite his ear off and brain his friend with a rock. Any traces of meekness were burned away in the pyre they made his farm and family. His face was not soft as he spoke, for the wisdom wasn’t anything nice. Good, but not nice.

“Look at me, Henry.” Janus’ voice grated from his throat, deep and rough. When he did, Janus nodded, “Bruno gave you an axe and told you to rise like a man. I aim to make you keep that promise, or I’ll take that axe from you and give it back.”

“I told you to swallow your ego. You give the enemy doubt and they’ll give you back a bloody death. You did good for your first day, own that.” Janus grabbed the haft of the axe that Bruno had given Henry and lifted it from its resting place against the wall. He offered it to Henry, “But the good you did today ain’t gonna keep a man like me from taking an axe like this from a man like you.”

“Worry not. By the time you and I are done, ain’t no one taking anything from anybody in this room. Take my compliments and the good you did today and sleep on them. Wake up in the morn, meet me here, and do better than that.”

It took Joy by surprise to see Janus turn so strict, like the ease had slipped from him and left only severity, etched into him in the stillness of the room. She could have heard a pin drop. Behind her back, her hand balled into a nervous fist and she felt it sting and grow hot as her nails pressed the raw flesh. She waited for Henry to speak, her other hand on him still — steady.

Henry swallowed hard. It was hard to meet Janus’ gaze and keep it there while the big man talked down at him. It made him feel small, very small, and yet… it kindled a spark in his belly. Janus wasn’t condescending, or treating him like a child. He was simply stating the facts and they were facts that Henry couldn’t argue with. That part made him feel small and weak and insignificant, but the truth was that he’d already known he was all of those things. Henry had no false illusions about his character and his skills.

So when Janus said that, despite all of that, he’d done good today and that tomorrow Janus expected better, Henry felt a determination rise within him -- to meet that challenge and to make sure that the Colovian would have nothing to complain about tomorrow. Still, he felt tears stinging in the corners of his eyes and he blinked them away, angry at his own body betraying him. He didn’t want to feel small. “Yes, sir,” he managed to say eventually and he straightened up as best he could.

“Time for sleep though,” Joy finally said, turning slightly to meet Henry’s eyes with her own. There was a determined arch on her own brow. “Up early to catch the sunrise through your window… And early enough to help me serve breakfast, yes?”

“I expect you early. Follow Joy in that.” Janus nodded before turning to finish the task of sharpening his weapons, “You two soldiers are dismissed. Remember, early morning for the next two weeks.”

“Yes, miss,” Henry said. It was nice to have a simple purpose tomorrow morning to help prepare him for the rest of the day. He nodded respectfully at both of them before bowing out of the room and leaving the Nord and the Imperial alone.

In the silence left behind, Joy practically counted the boy’s footsteps as he made his way to bed. The last of his torchlight melted into the dark and there were only two souls in the room now. “We’re not soldiers, Janus,” she said over her shoulder. “I understand that what you do is... “ she paused, thinking carefully on her words -- it wasn’t her area of expertise, not by a long shot. “I understand that you have to be hard. But we’re not soldiers.” She sighed and wrapped her arms around herself. “And we know that we are your inconvenience.”

“Don’t say that.” Janus shot back almost immediately, “I know you’re not soldiers. Hells, I never wanted to be one in the first place, but the world took everything else away from me.”

“The world just took everything away from Henry too, and I’d sooner spit myself on my father’s sword than watch him mope and wallow to death where I steeled myself and survived.” He turned around as his words almost sounded like a defense of himself more than Henry, “This isn’t a land made for lambs anymore, Joy. It’s a land of wolves now. The sooner I make him comfortable among it, the better for him.”

He stopped himself in his tirade and took a breath, looking Joy over in her sweat-damp clothes. His eyes softened a bit, “What’s your point, Joy?”

“Henry is special,” Joy answered with a slight wavering smile. “He’s sensitive,” she nodded. “He has value as he is today, this--” she stopped to motion her hand to the weapons. “This is just extra. I don’t… I don’t want his spirit to break over this. I don’t want him to break himself over this.” The Nord stopped and glanced down at the floor, toying with her nails. “I just want him to know how special he is right now too. He doesn’t know that yet. I want him to learn that.”

Suddenly, she stood up straighter and separated her hands, running one through her hair as she looked up and met Janus’ eyes from across the room. “I’m not asking you to go easy. But if we all turn to wolves, how do we ever go back?”

Janus pursed his lips and looked at the toes of his boots as he crossed his arms. Henry was sensitive, that much he knew. So was he, once, and a hundred other Nord boys he’d taught to kill. He’d become a wolf, and he never questioned for a long time whether or not he was better off for it. His eyes stayed on his boots as he spoke, “Life of a man is about only long enough to get good at one thing, aye.” He nodded, “That's what my pa said. So, you’d better be careful what you get good at.”

“I’m not asking you to follow Solomon and kill in the dead of night with him. I never wanted that for you, or Henry.” He snorted, a bit sheepishly, “You know I told him if he tried to take you two out with him on some daring raid, I’d dress him like a buck.”

He looked to Joy again, “Henry has to learn to face the world like a man, Joy. There’s no getting ‘round that. If it weren’t for me and Bruno, and the rest of those fools upstairs, do you think Henry would be alive?” Janus asked, “I’ve got a few new scars fighting some headless bastard to what I thought was my death for you and Henry.”

“I ain’t going to be around for every time someone wants to kill you. Special or not, I might care, you might care.” Janus shrugged, “And that’s the end of that list. He needs a teacher. I see it in his eyes he wants what I have. To be like me.”

The small, wistful smile dropped as he followed those words, “And I see it in your eyes that what I have and what I am… you don’t like it.” He looked at the table full of weapons, “I don’t blame you. Daresay I wouldn’t want to hug my family with these hands anymore.”

He let the silence fill the room as he felt that old thirst for the wine prod him like a finger in his back.

“You don’t know what it is my eyes see in you,” Joy said after the silence had become too loud to listen too. It was not confrontational, and her words were plain and lacking the melody of her usual speech. “I don’t know what my eyes see in you, but it’s not what you think.”

Joy paused again, before stepping across the room to remove the distance between them both. She positioned herself at the head of his table, placing a hand at each corner gingerly. “It’s not for you to jump in front of a creature for… Me and Henry. But you did. Someone else might have let us die. But you didn’t.” Her lips turned upwards as she lowered her head, searching for his eyes. “If there’s something that Henry wants to be it’s that — and that don’t come from hard training. That’s spirit. That’s heart.”

The Nord shrugged and let go of the table. Her legs felt numb, her arms ached, and her chest felt as though it had been crushed. “I might not like what this situation asks of you, Janus, but I like you.” Joy smiled again.

As she stepped further around the table she stopped, holding her hands out in front of her. The right was red and sore looking. They trembled and shook uncontrollably as the pain burned through from her delicate wrists down to the tips of her fingers. “I know that I don’t come from your world. I know that I don’t know what it means to be a soldier…” Joy shook her head slowly, almost allowing herself to feel the defeat in her own words. “But I know what it means to survive through wickedness… What it takes to survive.”

“I know.” Janus nodded, looking at her, a head shorter but none the more steadfast in her words. He believed her, “You know I worry. I care.”

As he looked at her in the light of the torches, he couldn’t help but remember a woman he once called his companion, his rock, his lots of things. And the child they’d had. “I care about y-“ he coughed into a fist, “About Henry. All of you. I couldn’t leave here knowing I didn’t do what I could to keep you safe.”

His easy smile curled his lip up crooked as he looked sidelong at Joy, “Couldn’t buy you a drink otherwise.”

Joy knew in the back of her mind that he was leaving, and when he reminded her of that she turned her head, bit at her lip. Did she want to open herself up to another stranger on the way out of her life?

That answer was always yes.

“And we’ll keep you safe, too.” Joy drew her hand to her chest, placing it flat against the centre. “This part of you safe—“ she tapped there, just gently. “If that means we practice til we can’t no more, if that makes it so you can go easy on your way. That’s our promise, Janus.”

Janus sighed, folding his arms tighter and nodding. He looked to Joy, knowing she wouldn’t have it any other way than how she wanted. “Fine.” He nodded, “Fine…”

The Nord couldn’t help but smile at that, warm and amused. “Goodnight then Janus,” Joy said - her tone resuming to normal, all brightness and music. She gave a tilt of her head, seeing him scrunch himself up in some kind of resignation of her. She leaned towards him, with a playful expression as if trying to draw away his tension. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

It was as she was turning to leave, she realised that she might not get the chance to even really help him. Not in two weeks... How much could she help a man with one foot out the door already?

“Oh and Janus,” she spoke up, looking over her shoulder to address him. “Something in the world that you can have is my time, should you ever want to talk about... Any of that. Think about it, anyway,” she concluded with a carefree shrug of her shoulders before making her way to the door.

Janus looked over his own shoulder, whetstone and a dagger with a blade the length of his forearm in hand. He set both down and nodded once, his easy smile returning, “Thank you.” He said, nodding down the corridor to the chambers upstairs, “Now get to sleep. We’ve all got breakfast to make, the three of us.”

Thought Static
With the fantabulous Stormy

---

The fading afternoon sun spilled through the wide windows of the keep, washing over the old wooden boards with orange and red, mottled with grey shadows that moved in an imperfect harmony with the howling wind that was forming. The music of the mountains, the rhythm of wild nature. They were in the thick of it now.

Sat upon one foot, the other leg dangling from the alcove set into the stone wall, Joy held a crust of bread in her hand, topped with cheese. The woman ate it thoughtfully, as dainty as a bird might as she gazed out upon the sprawling mountains that sheltered Ken Muhyr.

The sky seemed less bright today, as if each cloud was heaving a great sorrow inside, floating along and on by their very last strings. There was only one other time that Joy had witnessed such a dolorous sky. It was the thick black shadow of a flame in flight that parted those clouds and ripped them open to bleed rain.

Alone, in the vast emptiness of the hallway, Joy let free a sigh, tucking that hanging leg beneath herself as if fear and sadness had made a river over the floorboards, and she was desperately avoiding being carried away by the current.How did I get here? she thought to herself, away from Henry, away from Janus. The first moment of solitude that she had carved out since that fateful night.

It was so beautifully quiet here.

Too quiet for Sihava, as she slipped through the stone corridors with her habitual silence. On one hand, it was...nice. The fewer people there were, the lesser the chance of her confusing someone with her strange method of communication. No people meant no reason to miss her speech. But on the other hand, she always found herself missing people in places like this. Not just for the sake of her service to Nocturnal--not much for her to do if there were no people to steal from--but simply by her nature. She was a surprisingly social person--more so than her profession and her silence might suggest--and the quiet grated on her a bit.

She was exploring the old fort, searching for a place to stay for the night. Perhaps it was a consequence of her itinerant lifestyle, perhaps it was her own proclivity, perhaps it was both. But since she’d left home, she’d always found it difficult to stay in one place for any length of time. In that regard, Ken Muhyr suited her just fine, with no dearth of empty rooms that she could set up her bedroll in one day at a time, connected by a spiderweb of interlocking stone hallways that seemed to blend into each other as she walked.

It was down one of those hallways where she saw Joy, sitting in a small nook in the wall and eating some bread and cheese, and her heart leapt at the prospect of finally getting to talk to her, especially in the service of alleviating the crushing silence of this derelict grandeur. Taking specific care to scuff the floor a bit with her feet--she’d been smacked more than once for catching people off guard by her habitually quiet movement--she moved into the other woman’s line of sight, and slid down the wall, sitting with a soft sigh.

It was just as well the Dunmer made sound in her footsteps, Joy would have been caught off guard. Probably enough to send the bread flying free from her hand, to land cheese-side down on the floor.

Joy’s heart was happy to see Sihava too.

Especially after the previous days. It had felt like whole stretches of time had drawn on, with nothing for anyone to fill the silence with, not to mention the fact that the nord woman had been incredibly worried about Sihava while she had been whiling away the hours at Bruno’s cabin.

It had seemed that the events at The Loyal Hound, and the discoveries to follow had sewn a bond through these people, and Joy felt tethered to them. Not just for her own safety, but for theirs too. Their wellbeing sat at the forefront of her mind, and her eyes said as much now that she was alone with the Dunmer. As always, she displayed an almost unflinching expression of happiness on her face - bright eyed and grinning. “Sihava,” she said -- not too loud, and with a similarly graceful motion of her hand in a wave as she had done the first time they’d… Communicated.

For a moment, Sihava wondered how she would reply to Joy simply saying her name. The typical response, in her experience, would be to respond in kind, but she didn’t precisely know how to do that. Then, with a little smirk of realization on her face, she closed her eyes for a moment and imagined an emotion: pure, unrestrained happiness. She let it fly to Joy, her smirk turning into a pleased smile and a silent chuckle as she appreciated her pun, and how appropriate it was: she really was genuinely happy to see the other woman. She was surprised at how well she’d been holding up; just a cook and bard, it seemed, but as far as Sihava could tell, she’d been a consistent wellspring of...well, joy...despite the circumstances that she found herself in.

She paused for a moment, wondering how to continue, before motioning to the little nook in the wall where Joy sat, down the hallway, then out the window at the burning sunset before meeting her eyes and thinking the emotional equivalent of a question mark at her, as though to ask: what are you doing all the way up here?

It was a thing of wonder, to Joy, how Sihava used her magic to create her language. A large smile bloomed over her face as she felt the tingle, warmth, and gleeful aura of the greeting. She had always been an astute listener, but with Sihava, it was as much letting go of sound and tapping into intuition to be around her. Had the woman been born a mute? Joy wondered as she watched her gentle movements. It took a moment to process, but she nodded eventually. “Looking for a room… Well, there are so many that I’ve found already. Now I’m looking for the right one.” She gave a sigh and shrugged, before leaning forward, placing her fingertips curiously on the Dunmer’s lap. “Did you find a room yet?”

A grin spread across Sihava’s face and she held her arms up in an exaggerated shrug, letting a rapidfire series of images go across the divide between her and Joy: images of her sleeping under trees in the pouring rain, in dank, drafty caves, in the dim blue light of Ayleid ruins. Her smile widened, and dozens more followed, running the gamut from Elsweyr to Winterhold and everywhere in between. With them came a warm feeling of contentedness.

A more complicated emotion came after it, and with it, a tightening of the smile into a grim rictus. It was a similar warmth, but almost a...stifling one. A feeling of boredom, of returning to the same place night after night, of stability, of stagnancy; and leaking through her composure, a bitter draft of Windhelm’s frigid salt air. And finally, connected to that emotion, a single word of surprising vehemence as she grabbed Joy's hand: NEVER.

The nord took note of each of them -- wondering for herself what it would be like to sleep in a cave, or under the stars like that. To be as free as Sihava. It gave her a sense of longing, but Joy knew all too well what she wanted for herself. The very safety, stability, and even the stagnancy that her friend did not. “You have to find a spot of your own here though,” Joy remarked. “I bet you could have a different room or space every night if you wanted,” she chuckled. “It’d be like a game trying to find you each time.”

Her cheer restored, Sihava grinned and nodded, gesturing around at the lonely hallway. A feeling of coy confirmation, then a rapid series of images, no more than a blink each: all the different rooms she'd explored already. She patted the bedroll that was slung beneath her backpack, then gave another exaggerated shrug as if to say, who knows?

Joy watched each and every image as it materialised in front of her, a grin on her face each time something slid past. It was nice just to enjoy something as simple and mundane as this - even if it was dressed in beautiful magic. It was easy enough to forget the present. “I think I’ll stay close to the kitchen,” she said with a slight shrug. “There was a side door with a staircase and a room at the top. It’s not a tower like Solomon’s, but it’s tower enough,” she chuckled.

“Do you like flowers?” Joy asked, turning to meet Sihava’s gaze with her own, an excited sparkle ran across the blue of her irises. “There are lots of flowers here. Wild ones. Everywhere,” she explained with a smile.

Nodding emphatically, Sihava sent an image over the air to Joy: deathbell and nightshade flowers, batbloom, blue poppies, bugloss, lavender, and many more, including some that mightn’t exist outside of her own mind. Tons of flowers in every shadow of violet, purple, blue, indigo, black, all overflowing from pots in an imaginary greenhouse as she walked between the rows, tending each one individually. Her mind-self--and so Joy as well--smelled the heady perfume in the air, felt the warm humidity. She took a deep breath to inhale the scent, and then she opened up the eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed, finding her once again in the cool stone hallways of Ken Muhyr.

Of course, she’d never actually had that greenhouse, or anything like it, and she never would; she traveled far too much for something like that. But that didn’t mean she’d never thought about it.

Once again, Joy held out her hands as if to feel her way through the projected illusion. She knew of spells, vaguely. She knew that people could command lightning and fire -- and heal deep wounds. But this? This felt like real magic. The Nord smiled happily as it melted away. “Don’t get flowers like that in Windhelm…” The words were quiet, but there was a flicker of knowing in her tone as she glanced sidelong at Sihava. “None that I ever seen, anyway.”

The left corner of Sihava’s mouth turned up slightly in a sad smile, and she shook her head. A few more flowers flashed across the space between them; the nameless red mountain flowers of Skyrim, a sprig of dragon’s tongue. The traditional Dunmer vase they were in was beautiful, but cracked, and markedly out of place on the old wooden table that it sat upon. Within the vision, an image of Sihava frowned sternly at a much smaller, younger version of herself--perhaps twelve or thirteen--as it sat in a nearby chair, glaring hatefully at the flowers. Within Ken Muhyr, she laughed silently at the looks on both of her faces. Galerus had always told her she looked angry at rest.

Once the image faded, she tilted her head, a questioning look coming over her face as she peered at Joy, trying to remember if she’d ever seen her back in Windhelm. She didn’t think so. She gave an internal scornful laugh that perhaps showed on her face as a pained rictus of a smile: as much as she liked Joy, she was still a Nord from Windhelm. If Joy had interacted with her before, it probably would’ve been to mock her. Still, no harm in asking. Clamping back down on the darker emotions, she pulled out a stone that had managed to find its way into her pocket, and scratched into the floor from where she sat: where?

That image of Sihava in her younger years had brought the redhead back to her own. Joy was trying to put herself back to where she had also been at that formative age, and her expression turned to focus mid-thought until the scratching of the stone in the wood floor pulled her from it.

“Where?” She asked aloud, “oh! where!” She brought a smile to her face again, blinking slowly. “Here and there… I cooked in a lot of places. Around,” Joy answered evasively, waving a hand this way and that. “Inns, taverns… Around.” With a sigh her moving hands found their way to her lap. “Unimportant, really… I went all around and ended up… Here, with you!”

Bah. She’d been misinterpreted again. But, Sihava reflected, she really didn’t need to know where in Windhelm Joy had lived. The more information she acquired, the more likely Joy would want to know about her. And the less she had to tell, the better. Still, they were talking about the past, and she had plenty of harmless memories to show. With some difficulty, she fought down the painful ones before she threw a smile up on her face, hopefully quickly enough to mask the previous expression. Holding up a finger, she dug through her backpack, clearly searching for something specific.

After a few seconds, she surfaced, bearing in her hand a small, beaten-up book scrawled with the name Demivah Rallaron in broad, looping letters. She handled it like it would fall apart any second. Holding it out to Joy, she opened it to a random page, revealing it to be a beautifully-crafted, hand-drawn field guide. The narrow, bladelike petals of a nightshade flower presented themselves. A wave of nostalgia poured out of her, and the flickering image of an older, severe-looking Dunmer woman handing her the book followed it: one of her few purely positive memories from home.

As careful as Sihava had been, Joy was too — running her finger over the sketched lines with an emotional appreciation of each stroke and every detail. “Beautiful,” she said with a sigh. As the image of a woman appeared, the Nord raised a curious brow and looked to Sihava again. It still gave her an unfamiliar sense of wonder to experience Sihava’s language. “Your… Mother?” She asked quietly, as if she didn’t want her words to intrude on the melancholic silence that the woman could create.

A nod. Unable or unwilling to talk about this further through mysticism--perhaps not trusting herself to remain level-headed--Sihava pulled out the roll of vellum and quill, rapidly scratching out a message: She was a traveling merchant who came to Windhelm before the Great War did. Seems the city was friendlier once upon a time. Met my da there. Her flickering eyes caught Joy’s emotional response to the field guide, and she smiled internally. It never hurt to curry more favor and gain more trust, and Joy seemed the type to trust easily and carry her heart on her sleeve. If things somehow went belly-up with the group, it would be nice to have someone on her side.

“That’s a lovely story,” Joy smiled, nodding at Sihava. It made her think of the woman’s parents, and again of her upbringing. “I just think of the cold,” she said suddenly. “Snow piling around the windows, the way the cold air blew through any crack in the wall.” She dared not ask the Dunmer if her parents were still alive. “We’re both so far from there now, and suddenly everything around us feels… Less friendly.”

Sihava breathed slowly out of her nose, and her jaw tightened as her grip on her emotions wavered. She couldn’t help but wonder; such a lovely-looking human girl. What had happened to her in Windhelm? Her mouth twisted up, and she wished that she could read minds as easily as she projected her own thoughts. She stood up and stretched with a grimace, pacing up and down the hallway a few steps each way. With each step, her thoughts darkened, and measure by measure, she grew less controlled: What does she know about Windhelm’s cold? Who does she think she is?

Then, with a sudden piercing stare, she crammed more memory into Joy’s head: all of the bigotry that had been directed her way during her childhood, condensed. Flashes of insults, pushes, punches, glares, backhanded comments from the guards; the little things she’d gotten from her parents, stolen. For just a moment, her mind ignited with a burning, vindictive glee: it felt good to show a Nord what it was like. To force a Nord to know what it was like. It felt right. It felt powerful.

A half-moment later, she cut off the barrage of memories with a snap, her face a perfect mask of apology. She plopped herself to the ground, taking out the stone again, and wrote out in small letters: I’m sorry. That is Windhelm to me. And though her face was drawn and penitent, she nursed a tiny, hidden, knifelike smile.

Whatever it was that Sihava had done to conjure and create such a rapidly vicious storm of magic struck Joy like thunder, as if in a monsoon she became drenched in it. Her innocent mind, that had been so free of the touches of magic drew in all of it, all at once.Unwilling. At first, her face fell as she felt the raw emotions as if they were her own, and then…

She was there, somewhere in her own memories. The wooden walls of a building from her past, and the red and tear-stained face of a young boy, black of hair, whimpering and squawking, bent over a table with the flesh of his back exposed in a hideous firelight. A tall and scornful woman stood behind him with a belt in hand, as she moved to bring down the belt again—the memory dissolved around Joy, and the walls moved away as the bitter cold alleyways of Windhelm encased her instead. Where there had been a boy, there was now the same pouting Dunmer girl from before. It was real, she was there. Watching. Watching as it happened until she couldn’t watch any more of it. “Leave her alone!” she barked out assertively — her own words dispelling the illusion as she found herself standing away from the nook with a fist clenched.

“I…” Joy said, her hardened expression softened in confusion. On the ground, Sihava was sat with an apology spelled out in her recognisable cursive. “Did I… Did I know you?” Joy asked, her eyes wide with bewilderment. It didn’t feel right, she knew she hadn’t been there. She knew it… But now she couldn’t be certain and she glanced at the wisps of magic that hung around like hypnotic perfume.

Sihava’s eyes shot open, her mouth went dry, the smile fled, and she came back to herself. It had felt amazing, in that moment, to punish a Nord. But this wasn’t just ‘a Nord.’ This was Joy. This was the bartender who had defused the situation in the Loyal Hound. This was the bard that had been swept into a situation she was wholly unprepared to deal with. This was the joyous woman that had asked her about flowers. This was her companion in Windhelm, in a shared darkness from their pasts. And...something had gone wrong. She’d felt it. When she’d pressed her memories into Joy, Joy’s memories hadn’t pushed back. Instead, they’d wrapped hers, pulling them in and internalizing them. Whatever had happened here, it had never happened before. She stared at Joy with an emotion triangulated somewhere between shock, horror, and revulsion.

Immediately afterwards, the entire hallway was flooded with the warm scent of a hundred apologies, and before she really knew what was happening, she was on her feet, with Joy’s hands in hers and shaking her head. She couldn’t properly structure her mysticism, scattered as she was after that: all there was was an endless repetition of two desperate words:

...I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…

It took Joy a moment to come around enough to stand up too, holding Sihava’s hands tightly in her own. Her brow furrowed in confusion, eyes wide with disorientation but there was no anger there, not a drop of it. “I…” she began, trying to find the words amongst the deafening noise around her.

She couldn’t. Instead she pinched down on Sihava’s palms, drawing circles with her thumbs on each. It’s going to be alright, she expressed from within, that intention coming through in her touch. A swarm of hornets buzzed between her ears, disrupting her from forming a coherent word, a thought even…

All that the bard could manage was a single and elongated “shhhhhhhhhhh.”

“You basket-headed bastard,” Bruno quietly swore to himself as he poured another bucket of hot water over his head, “just had to go and get yourself covered in spider guts…”

Since the shepherd’s little escapade with two old dick-measuring has-been soldiers, he had taken it upon himself to investigate the tower’s well. It took some work and tender loving care on the pipes to get the pump working again, along with the help of some caulking and grinding away at the rust, but he was able to conjure up some water after an hour of work. By the time he was done, the spider ichor was already drying and caking to his skin and hair, and he was practically racing to bring buckets of water to the nearest lavatory and get a small fire going to heat up a cauldron. He was scratching the flaking ichor off his skin and combing his fingers through his beard to get as much of the crap off of him as he could. All the while though, he couldn’t help but think back on Solomon and Janus and their incessant kvetching like a pair of old crones. All the bathing thoughts came to him only after the fact, the things that he could’ve said that would have really sent them crying to their mothers -- and to think both of their problems came from the same exact source: their Gods-be-damned pride. Shit, if Bruno had any pride left, then maybe he’d be feeling a little bit worse after his own tirade.

The nord’s scrubbing slowed to a halt, leaving himself to stew not just in the gravy of hot water, soap, dirt, blood, and spider guts he was sitting in, but also his thoughts. As much as he tried to hide it in front of others, he was still hurting. He knew that. He never tried to lie to himself otherwise, and as much as he preferred to hide himself away from the rest of the world in his own little cabin, it was also his greatest source of pain -- but he never let himself go like that, not since he lost them. He tried to rationalize his loss of control by reminding himself that there was a random zombie apocalypse and that he had to leave his home behind and slaughter his entire flock… but that was the way of things, doing what you have to do in order to survive, but Gods, he was so tired. He was tired of rebuilding and only wanted to keep what he had left. He was tired of meeting new people and getting close to them. He just wanted to live out the rest of his days in boring, peaceful misery.

But then he had to leave his home behind and find himself taking care of a new bundle of idiots. Lone wolf idiots, idiots with death wishes, magical idiots, idiots who can’t keep track of their shoes, idiots who can’t even speak -- idiots he’d inevitably get attached to and end up losing, as par for the course. Then there was him: the idiot who can’t even keep himself together, let alone a ragtag band of misfits. Let alone a family. Perhaps, he realized, he was hurting even more than he thought. He was hoping he’d grow numb to it as time passed, that the pain would dull as the years had gone by -- but instead it festered. It never really dulled; he had just become accustomed to it, he acclimated. He couldn’t even imagine what living without it would even feel like anymore. This was the new normal.

Bruno combed his fingers through his beard and shook off another glob of rehydrated guts onto the floorboards outside the tub. “This is the new normal,” he muttered out loud. He dumped another bucket of hot water over his head, rinsing the rest of the grime from his body.

When he was finally finished, he fetched the clean change of clothes he brought with him. He slipped into his fur shoes and trousers, but between the heat of the bath and the humidity of the air, he continued with his shirt unbuttoned and his towel over his shoulders. The chill air against wet skin felt almost rejuvenating; cold, sure, but the biting sensation about perked him up, kept him awake and primed his mind. He spent more time he normally would’ve in the bath to the point where he lost track of time, but given the mess he made of himself and the mess in his head, he could probably find it within his stone cold heart to forgive himself this one time. As he wandered the gloomy and abandoned halls of the fort, enjoying the feeling of the cool air on his skin and occasionally stealing a sour glance at one of the others from a comfortable distance, he happened upon a remote space near the top of one of the towers.

On one hand he was curious, and on the other, he doubted help would be nearby if he got himself into trouble again -- and he had just taken a bath. Groaning under his breath and low-key praying that he wouldn’t be walking into more spiders, he opened the door and found himself in a room dimly lit by that baleful moonlight. It looked like a storage space and… he heard heavy breathing. Cautiously turning a corner… he found Bozo. The dog was panting quite happily with a rat the size of his head between his two front paws. Bruno sighed, lifting the anxiety from his shoulders as he gazed upon his oldest living companion.

“Already putting yourself to work, eh? Heh, good dog,” He muttered before affectionately rubbing the animal on the top of its head. He looked his head out the empty window, no pane of glass keeping himself and a steep drop toward his maker. The stars performed their twisted dance around the moon, as if they were a coil of chains keeping it from moving and further across the sky. He wondered if this night would ever end, as by now he expected that the sun’s light ough to be causing a glow off in a distance horizon somewhere, casting some of these stars back into the void, but it seemed as though these stars were here to stay. So too would their light about the ground.

The ground. Bruno looked to the ground, seeing bodies shamble across the countryside. He could see for miles, and that brought an unexpected smile to his face. Knowing Solomon, he might always want someone posted up here and maybe that might be a reason not to tell him, but still, they’d all probably benefit from transforming this room into something less dilapidated. They ought to keep the monsters from within creeping about. It was about time he boarded up that spider burrow.

“Bozo, come with,” he barked, prompting the dog to drop its quarry and follow at Bruno’s heel.

Later, down at the bottom of the stairs where the armory was located and where the bodies of many frostbite spiders lay dead, Bruno stood before them with his shirt on and a satchel of tools and a few planks of wood. The dog was at his side still and looking curiously at the bodies around and into the darkness behind the wall he was meant to board up. Unfamiliarity begets anxiety. Still, Bruno talked to his dog if he thought there was any chance that his voice could bring the animal comfort. Saying sarcastically, “don’t worry, we’ll play fetch with its legs later.”

Setting the supplies down, he got to work on boarding up the wall. He began humming a song to himself when he had nails sticking out of his mouth and whistled when there weren’t. When his hands were full of planks and nails, he’d look to Bozo, knock on the wood, and his dog would come up and fetch Bruno’s hammer for him. “Mmph, good boy,” he’d say, a nail or two sticking out the corner of his lips. Board one, board two.

“Oh! dirty sundries, you make me house cold,
rusty spanners w’ worn wood peel,
woolen booties, holes in the heel,
oh dirty sundries, filthy reminders of olde.

“Oh! dirty sundries, you make me house a catacomb
of me arts n’ wares be dull,
shadow of longing, wit’out brain be ye a skull;
oh dirty sundries, you make me house home.”