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Apotheosis I	By : OneMoreAltmer Category: +A through F > Elder Scrolls - Oblivion Views: 2266 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I didn't create and do not own Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or its characters (except for Tavi, within game format). I make no moneys.

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Eleven � The Beautiful
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The second session, in the deep part of the night that first
turns toward morning, was more in our usual vein:� still ardent but gentled.� That time, we lay in the darkness for a while
and talked before going back to sleep.
�So,� he said.� �How are you at conjuration, now that you
went and studied?�
Nice that he could not see the shame in my face.� �Dreadful.�
You were right, there isn�t time for me to
learn it well enough.�� And then I was
compelled to add, �There isn�t enough time in this age of the world for it.�
He chuckled.� �No one
masters every school, you know.� You
should see me try to make a potion.�
�I didn�t want my weakness to be conjuration.� I wanted to � �
�You wanted to save me.�
I know.�� He found and kissed my
forehead.� �I told you, I will think of
something.�� We were quiet for a moment
before he added, �And I�m sorry.�
�Why are you sorry?�
�Because I know I was hurtful to you.�� He pulled me a little closer.� �And because it�s dawned on me how stupid a
thing I was angry about.�
�It wasn�t stupid.�
You worried for me.� I could have
sent letters.�
�And what if one had been intercepted?� Then it would have been the Mythic Dawn who
knew where you were headed next, and not me.�
Your skill and your hope lie in staying hidden.��
�A thing I�m sure Jauffre pointed out to you.�
�Oh, of course.� More than once.� It doesn�t mean I was listening.� But it�s penetrated my skull now.� �He sighed. ��I have to learn to trust your silence to be a
good sign and not a bad one.�
I nestled into him drowsily.�
�And that I will always want you more than a Nord pirate.�
He laughed.�
�Yes.� And
that.�
In the light of morning he saw the bright red marks where he
had bitten me, and he winced.� I�d
expected that, so I kissed him until his face softened again.� Then I told him that love bites were good for
repelling pirates, and he growled at me.
No one gave us strange looks when we came out to breakfast,
although Jauffre seemed to avoid looking either of us in the eye at all.
But that was no good, since I actually did need to talk to
him.� I approached him a couple of hours
after mess and told him so.
He finally looked straight at me, with a deliberate
blandness in his face.� �If you need me
to, Tintaviel, I will say this once.� The
Blades have been personal guards to the Emperors for centuries.� What we see and hear, we do not discuss.� Not with outsiders, not amongst ourselves,
and not with those we might see or hear.�
Rulers cannot be afforded real privacy, but we are trained to compensate
them with silence.�
�Ah.� Thank you.�� I cleared my throat uncomfortably.� �But really I needed to ask you about Sancre
Tor.�� I explained the need, and as I did
so, what little color he had seemed to leech out of him.
Haunted, he said.�
Desecrated and lost, a tragedy to the Order but one they had never
succeeded in correcting.� In fact the
place had been sealed up and the key passed down through the Grandmasters ever
since.� He saw the need and would give me
the key, but he worried for me.
�Tsk.� It was one thing
when you regarded me this way and I was a stranger, Jauffre.� Surely by now I�m proven.��
He accepted my reproach with a wan smile.� �You are proven.� If anyone can do it, you can.� Good luck to you, Sister.�

Its name in elven had meant �Golden Hill,� but it was not
golden.
�Haunted,� he had said, and I had envisioned some handful of
ghosts or wraiths, such as I might have found in any old and unquiet place I
had explored.� But when he had said
�haunted� he had evidently meant �drowning in a sea of uneasy spirits,� because
there seemed to be no end to them.� I was
still smarting from wounds I hadn�t paused to heal when I encountered the first
of the great skeletons.� The first shock
from my staff � for already I had started to fear for my stamina � did not fell
him, and he was able to cut into me with his heavy blade.� I gasped, and barely had enough time to run magicka
into the wound to close it before I had to use the staff to block the next
cut.� I drew my own sword and stood and
fought, never my preference, and whenever he left me space for a breath, I
filled it with little blasts.
One of these had just found his head and knocked him back,
and I was raising my sword when he dropped to one knee, raised a hand, and
shouted, �Hold!�
Hold?� Hold??
The bones fell and scattered, but there was a rippling vapor
in the space that had held them together.�
In the second it took for me to reflect that I had never seen this
reaction before, the ripple ended, and the spirit took shape before me, still
kneeling.� �Hold, Sister,� it whispered.
It wore a Blade�s armor.
I lowered my sword, panting.�
�Then why did you fight me?� I snarled.
He�d had no choice.�
He was one of four Blades ensorcelled by some Under King to keep hold of
the place.� I would, he said apologetically,
have to defeat the other three the way I�d defeated him, before they could come
together to lift the enchantment that would bar my access to the armor.� And they had no control over the other ghosts
and wraiths that still blocked my way.
Rapture.� I took the opportunity to cast some
restoration spells on myself.� I cast
many that day, enough to improve my skill at them
permanently:� the building was enormous
and full of horrid things.�
Still I won my way out with the sacred armor, and the Blades
and Jauffre received me back happily, and Martin grinned and kissed me out in front of everyone and proclaimed
how relentlessly grand I was.

Compared to the last time I�d come home, he was in remarkably high spirits.
�I knew you would be all right,� he said, flippant, as
though this was something he�d always known and it would be ridiculous of me to
suggest otherwise.� �And I�ve made more
progress, and the task I must set you next is one to which I know how well
you�re suited.�� He smiled as I raised my
eyebrows at him and added, �It will involve an Ayleid ruin.�
I beamed.� �Oh my!� Ayleid
ruins.� They�re quite dangerous.�
�That�s what I hear.�
I was hoping to hire an experienced treasure hunter, but I suppose I�ll
have to send you instead.�
In spite of our standing in the middle of the main hall, I
was too amused to feel shy, so I snuggled close to him and laid a hand on his
chest, purring.� �And what treasure am I
finding for you, my Emperor?�
His smile was growing amorous, and it took him a second to
remember that he needed to answer the question.�
�A Great Welkynd stone.�
I traced his collarbone with one fingertip.� �That may be a challenge.� They were the first things plundered after
the Ayleids fell.� I�ve never encountered
one.�
�Have you ever been inside Miscarcand?�� I shook my head.� �From what I�ve read, there may still be one
there.� But it may be guarded by a
lich-king.�
�He would not be my first.��
I gave him a teasing kiss on the cheek.�
�Where is Miscarcand?�
�Down past Skingrad.�
�Uch!� I hate
Skingrad.� There�s some mad little Bosmer
who always follows me around, and Hassildor is insufferable.� I wonder if he got the letter you sent when I
was there, and just didn�t see fit to tell me.�
�Then you won�t be tempted to dawdle.�� He kissed my cheek in turn, then stayed close to whisper in my ear.� �How long will you be here?�
�It would be pointless to leave this late in the day.�
He nestled his face into my hair and brought a hand up to my
waist.� �Good.� Then we should probably retire before I
forget your modesty.�
�As if you had ever remembered it.�
He offered to walk with my hand on his, a gentleman leading
a lady.� I laughed and set my fingers
gently on top of his.� That was how
enamored I was.

Miscarcand was familiar and comfortable.� Granted, I was aided along by timing, since
there was some territorial clash between the lich-king�s attendant skeletons
and a tribe of goblins when I arrived.� I
was able to sneak past most of the carnage and focus on picking off the occasional
straggler.� Otherwise, the ruin held no
surprises for me other than the loveliness of the stone for which I had been
sent.
When I came back to Skingrad I was greeted with an urgent
message to come and receive a sealed letter at the castle.� At first I assumed this to be Skingrad�s copy
of my letter from Martin, and tried to explain that I had received the message
elsewhere � but I was incorrect.� This,
the fellow said, had the seal of the Arch-Mage.
Count Hassildor � who, for all that he is a strong and
dignified leader, is still truly insufferable � gave it to me himself, saying
that given current affairs in the Guild, he had been loath to hand it over to
anyone else.� Traven lacked Martin�s
succinctness.� He hoped that his letter
found me well, had heard of the great works I was doing for the Crown and was
sure I was very busy with them, and would not have thought to trouble me with
his unpleasant business, but sadly he had no one else he trusted to turn to,
given that his last two remaining Council members had run off in opposite
directions from each other, carrying artifacts they had needed to study in
order to fend off the threat from the necromancers, and neither had been heard
from again, so could I please.
Gah.
I supposed that Martin would still need time to puzzle out
the next part of the spell, and that I did not really want the necromancers to
run rampant over the Guild while I was busy elsewhere.
I found Caranya first, in a fort west of Chorrol.� She was supposed to be studying a necromantic
amulet.� She was using it:� she and her
cohorts were sympathizers of Mannimarco, the King of Worms.�
Caranya, of course, was one of my kind.� An arrogant, power-hungry Altmer!� Can you imagine?
She was no one to get into a spell-lobbing match with, so,
since she�d been foolish enough to let me in close with the thought that I�d
come to join her, I stabbed her instead.�
Her companions I could more easily dispatch by my preferred method, at a
distance, one by one.
Irlav Jarol was supposed to be down near Leyawiin � not near
enough for the rain.� Necromancers were
already attacking there, and the firefights as I tried to make my way down into
the fort were terrible.� When I came to
the floors that were underground, the necromancers started turning up dead
without my help, and there were sounds of battle ahead of me.� I supposed that to mean I was going to find
Jarol�s people still alive, but when I reached the noise, it was necromancers
fighting daedra.
No conjurers.� Only daedra.
The truth became self-evident when I finally found Jarol�s
body, still wearing the helm that buzzed loudly with powers of
conjuration.� He had not been a good
enough conjurer to control it.� I took it
and stuffed it unceremoniously into my bag, despising conjuration yet again.
I took the amulet and helm back to Traven at the University,
and he was most distressed.� He knew now
that the necromancers possessed a black soul gem, the kind needed to trap a
human soul, of particularly great power.�
So he begged me to go back to Skingrad � where I had started, for the
love of the gods � and help to capture it from the necromancers that had been
found there, before they used it against us.
There being no vexed word from Martin awaiting me in
Skingrad, I went to the nearby ruin � refreshingly not a cave � where Traven
had also sent three Battlemages to impede me.�
I�d told him I worked best
alone, the silly old � well, but here they were.� They told me that the necromancer we were
here to stop was none other than the fine Altmer gentleman (an arrogant,
power-hungry Altmer! Imagine!) who had tried to kill
me for needing a letter of recommendation in Cheydinhal.

The pleasure was all mine.
We intercepted them on their way into their lair, and many
of them died, but Falcar himself managed to open the lock and scurry
inside.� This was just what I had wanted
him to do:� now I could get in myself and
hunt him down along with anyone else he had with him.
By now I was a Master Wizard, and few even of my own sort could stand against me for long in an open
firefight.� Soon the gem was mine, and
again I carried it back to Traven.
I�d always thought of him as a kindly but somewhat broken
old man; so much of his carriage seemed marked by indecision and
disappointment.� But when I gave him the
black soul gem, he told me that in a moment I must take it again and use it to
protect me against the King of Worms, whom he implored me to destroy for the
safety of the Guild and the Empire.
And then, before I even had time to make surly noises about
all the favors I�d already been doing for the Empire and then accept anyway�he
shuddered, and gasped in pain, and curled in on himself over the stone.
�Hannibal!�
I cried, stooping with my arms out to give assistance that was already too
late.� He was dead.� The gem burned bright with his stolen
essence.
We had not been close � professionally amiable, nothing
more.� Still, I can name that as the
point where my losses began.
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Apotheosis I