Andel had seen better days.
It had been two days since his arrival in Anvil, and yet his flesh and joints ached with the reminders of the journey, the experience of sitting hunched in a poorly fitted wagon moving across a long unpaved road having almost shaken the meat off his bones during the creaky ride. The poorly lit room was tiny and bare of any furnishings and smelled of the sour sweat of its previous occupants despite the open windows, the summer warmth and the windless skies having joined forces to make the circumstances even more unpalatable. Stripped of his clothes save his shirt and breeches, he lay on the bed, at this point only able to hope to cool down for he had already attempted everything else. As he lay still, he scoured in himself the energy to at the very least get up and perhaps jot down his latest impressions in his long-neglected journal, yet there seemed none to be found.
In what felt like mere seconds he found himself dozing off and was suddenly jolted awake by a primordial sort of fear, his body mistaking sleep for death perhaps, and in the following few moments he inferred from the shadows of the buildings outside the window that he’d been asleep for a few hours. He was parched. He would have yearned for a glass of iced Aalto of Third Era vintage had he thought that he could find -or afford- one, but he knew it not to be the case, and thus he yearned for simpler things, a glass of cold well-water, a cutlet, maybe some tobacco. He wiped the dewy sweat off his brow and reached for his purse, emptying its contents onto the nightstand beside his bed. He set apart three Septims -why they were still called Septims he did not know, there hadn’t been a Septim Emperor on them for the last hundred years- of gold and twenty of silver. No, not twenty. Nineteen. He picked up the stray coin with his two fingers and held it up so it could be better seen by candlelight.
Runic inscriptions. Aldmeri, perhaps? A Dominion coin? No. Too geometric, too clean. Dwemer. Sweet Zenithar. Vvardenfell mintage, maybe? No. Not as sophisticated. Reach, most likely. Maybe Hammerfell. Ten gold Septims, at least.
A sense of elation took over him, a sudden jolt of energy, electricity running in his veins. He slid his legs off the bed, reaching to grab his stockings and putting them on with practiced alacrity and then came his boots, crude and heavy, but at the very least, somewhat comfortable. He stood up and began reaching across the room to gather the items of his clothing, and in a manner of moments he was all clothed again, save his overcoat, for the heat was already nigh unbearable. All that was left was his sword belt, and he was good to go. He looked at it, draped across the sole chair in the room upon which his two swords sat. It too was worn after a delay, tightly buckled, for otherwise it could not bear its burden. He reached for the door, then remembered that he’d forgotten his purse, and after filling it back with the coins spilled upon the nightstand, save the Dwemer one which went in his breast pocket, he put it in his satchel and left his room.
One cramped hallway, one creaky staircase and one door later, he was finally outside to bask in the middling glory of the city of Anvil. The last two hundred years had not been kind to the city and for one who knew where to look it showed, with most its houses ramshackle and shoddily built and lacking architectural cohesion, its roads all bent and labyrinthine and paved unevenly, and the city walls patchwork, bearing the damage of the Great War still. In a hundred years the chaos would become part of the city’s aesthetic and add to it rather than subtract, Andel thought; for now it was all too recent to be anything other than an eyesore. He began walking to the town square, not knowing where exactly the market district or the local Synod lay, and as he walked a feeling of foreboding walked with him, growing more and more palpable as he passed through shadowy alleyway after another. At some moments, in narrow streets where the roofs were so close together that the sun barely shone through, this feeling grew so intense that his hand instinctively reached for his sword, but before it found reason to be grounded in reality, he reached the bustling openness of the town square and the feeling was gone.
A few greetings and a few questions later, he knew where to go. An enchanter, by the name of Cassia, was in the hobby of buying such trinkets, enchanting them, and selling them at a higher price. Had he known the subtleties of magic, Andel could have called it unfair, but as he stood he had no right to complain. He walked towards the Old Town, where the wider streets and wholesome even if unmaintained houses made of white stone and crowned with red tiles made for a more pleasant experience. He thought of Cheydinhal and its lush greenery, its black spires and the quiet flow of the Corbolo, and a yearning stung his soul for thinking of it and he turned right as per the directions given to him and upon finding the house with a tiny Akaviri statue on its lawn, walked up to the door and knocked. To his surprise, the hefty wooden door opened itself. “Come on in,” someone shouted from inside, their voice muffled as if it were being heard through a wall. “Upstairs! In the study!”
Andel walked in and lightly shut the door behind him, puzzled by the state of affairs and the amount of Dwemer oil lamps that lit the house for all the curtains were kept shut. Curiosity kept his head on a swivel, his gaze scanning over whatever of interest that he could see, but courtesy kept him from changing his course. He walked upstairs and crossed the hallway, passing by a few paintings, the fossilized remains of what seemed to be an aquatic lifeform and the skeleton of a bipedal creature, not unlike a troll but not quite a troll’s size, and finally reached the study. Inside was a waifish woman, her gaze fixated on a circular object about the size of an orange, shaped not unlike a mirror save the fact that it was pure black as if made of ebony. Andel reckoned it to be rude to interrupt and gazed around the room, which reminded him more of a cabinet of curiosities than a study. Amongst the oddities he saw were fossils, molluscs, bezoars real and imagined, an egg the size of his head coated in gold, and gems, a whole lot of gems, and a mandrake root dressed in doll’s clothing, and a prismatic piece of amber in which a faint silhouette could be seen, and crystal balls, and tomes, and a small terrarium in which a centipede the size of a python kept writhing and writhing. The ebony mirror that the woman was looking into suddenly grew red hot and began melting, setting the table on which it stood afire, leading the woman to grabbing a wall rug and wildly smacking the budding fires before coming to a halt. She turned, her hair a mess, and smiled with a glint in her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting that. I’m Cassia. Cassia Carantha.”
Suddenly, Andel wasn’t sure if this was worth the ten pieces of gold.
“Sir Andel Indarys, at your service, madam.”
Her eyes grew wider with excitement.
“A nobleman! Oh, how wonderful. Prithee, what has brought you to my humble abode?” She asked, her sudden shift for the archaic no doubt inspired by his title.
“I, ahem, I was told that you have an interest in oddities of historical value, and being in possession of such an item, figured that you would have more use for it than I.”
She smiled. “Why, yes, it’s true. I suppose you can tell from the room. And the house. What is it that you have for me, Sir Aristocratus?”
He reached inside his breast pocket and picked out the coin and reached his arm out to show it to the woman. “A coin. A Dwemer coin, I reckon. The inscriptions aren’t that far off from what I’ve seen.”
She walked closer, her brows momentarily rising upon the utterance of the name of the long-lost tribe. Hunching forward and squinting to see the coin better, she shifted the angle of her head to take a look at differing angles, and eventually stood back up. “Dwemer indeed. How’d you come upon this, may I ask?”
“Found it in my coinpurse. I figure that someone passed it onto me as change without realizing its provenance.”
Cassia smiled. “Not the first time I’ve heard a story like that. Such is often the case with antiques and curiosities. See this, for instance,” she said, tapping the glass prison of the giant centipede, “You’d think it to be no more than an overgrown insect, but it’s actually a Daedra.”
Andel didn’t respond.
“Well, Daedric fauna, rather. They say they used to be quite common in the years following the Oblivion Crisis, but these days… Not so much. Bought it off a bunch of kids who kept in a jar. Can you believe it? It can breathe fire, you know! Could’ve burnt them to a crisp! Would you like to see it?”
“No. I mean, I’m not sure if I have the time. Got a very tight schedule today, you see.”
“Oh, oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She seemed genuinely upset by her lack of manners. “But, yes. A coin. What exactly it is that you want of it? An appraisal? A determination of its precise origins? Its previous owner? An enchantment? A disenchantment?”
“I simply wanted to sell it, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, certainly,” she said, even though Andel was sure he could sense some second-hand disappointment in her voice, “Let me take a closer look and I can give you a price estimate.” She took the coin off his hand, the care she took against her hand touching his dealing a slight blow to his confidence, and placed it on the table on which the black mirror had melted and then procured a device from underneath the table, a rather unwieldy microscope, under whose lens the coin was placed and then thoroughly examined. “Hm. Hmm. Mhm,” she murmured to herself as she rotated the plate on which the coin lay. “Skyrim mintage. Had it been from Vvardenfell, I’d have said it to be your lucky day; but still, not bad. What were you expecting for this, hm?”
“I’m aware that it’s no Vvardenfell sample, but it’s Dwemer silver nonetheless. And, as a plus, it’s in good condition. I was hoping for something around twenty pieces of gold, maybe?”
Cassia turned her head back at Andel, her gaze different, almost predatory, eyeing something to be auctioned. His gaze met hers.
“Fifteen. This isn’t the Imperial City. Maybe if it were Kagrenac on the obverse.”
“…It would appear that we have an agreement.”
Andel could not help but notice how quickly time must have passed in the short amount of time that he’d spent in the enchantress’ house. The setting motion of the sun was not unappreciated by the Dunmer, who’d found his molestation by the heat quite intolerable, and now, stronger gusts brought a welcome chill to his flesh. He took the scenic route, not wishing to treat himself once more to the horrors of the choked alleyways, taking in the sight of the sun bleeding purple into the sky and the sea. It had dimmed, closer to the color of an effervescent egg yolk. He stood awhile, his hands around his waist, feeling triumphant for having managed to find a way to extend his journey for yet another month without want of money. It was not without humiliation to find a victory in an event so trifle, but days in which it was an unfamiliar feeling were long gone.
As the sun drowned on the horizon, he made his way back to the Dancing Donkey, hoping to treat himself to a grilled rabbit.
