Chapter Text
The False Dragonborn
Chapter 1: The Three-Part Problem
“Ugh, what a reek! Are you sure these lizards are still alive?”
She was being crushed under a cold, stinking weight, facedown into putrid-thick water and icy-slick stone. She was numb, petrified, stiff like the dead while the smell, the smell of rot and burned meat clung heavy in her lungs, to her tongue.
“You had better hope they are. She wanted one born under the Ritual, those are…”
Two voices, close but somehow muffled. She heard but couldn’t understand; everything was muddled, slow. Within her head was an endless expanse of echoing darkness, and something vitally important was missing. A connection. Everything.
“Over here, there should be two left but I only see—no, there’s the other. Looks like you’ll need to get your feet wet after all; I need help moving this one.”
Sloshing, waves that lapped across her nose, over her head. She breathed, trying to move and failing. Confusion was beginning to penetrate the thick, sick fog clouding her thoughts. This was wrong. She was doing something important—no. Something vital. She was needed somewhere—Thorn? Or was it Stormhold?
“Hurry up before this muck ruins my boots.”
The crushing weight shifted, lurched – a ripping squelch, and then cold, slimy ropes slithered across her back and sides. Coughing and gagging above her, another wave of putrid water doing little to shift the rotting intestines as their previous owner was forcefully heaved from her back, landing with a muted splash beside her. It was dim, but her eyes were open, her head in just the right position to see him; frills ragged, one eye shriveled to nothing and the other bloated, filmed white, most of his face sloughed off like dead lichen.
Something must have gone wrong. She must have failed. She must have been…captured? Enslaved?
More water was being thrown over her, deliberate, and then hands were touching her – soft skins. Men. Mer.
And still she was petrified, unable to move, barely able to breathe. It shouldn’t have been possible. She should have countered it by now, somehow…
They carried her out of the darkness, up stairs and into a tunnel lit by smoking torches, and the one gripping her under the arms nearly dropped her when he stumbled. She could mostly understand him when he spoke, this time; something similar to the trader’s tongue of men, but harsher.
“Where,” he drawled slowly, his accent, his accent; that was familiar, it sent a bolt of blood-burning hatred through her. “Where did our esteemed mistress manage to acquire this rare treasure?”
The one with a painful grip around her ankles grunted in frustration, and they began moving again. This one spoke his tongue with an unfamiliar brogue and a certain flavor of skepticism. “If I remember right, she had pirates intercept a ship from Morrowind on its way to Solsteim, Mora knows how. Or why.”
The dark elf laughed. “My, someone in House Telvanni is going to be quite upset over this, how I wish I could see it!”
Telvanni? No, it wasn’t—
“Over one lizard? Don’t your people enslave them by the hundreds?”
“Oh, nevermind, nevermind. Do you think she’ll let me have this one when she’s done?”
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Fire their skin was on fire they were screaming but their voice was wrong.
“If you won’t answer, then you simply shall not speak, hmm? I can find out for myself.”
Gold skin-gold hair-gold eyes-gold hands —wrongwrongwrong everything was wrong, it was impossible, it couldn’t be real,— and a strip of leather wrapped around their…snout?
“Now, let’s try this again.”
Hands coming closer and a sound like a warping warble and purple-black-glow—a hallucination? It had to be—
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Carving sharp, burn-pain, the sizzle of flesh. A dark cave of a stone room lit by candles on the floor. An altar broken by a boulder. A statue, tilted; a man with a sword and a winged helmet. A snake. A stone axe-head.
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The muzzle chafed in a way that grated beyond the physical sensation of pain. The body was much the same; not right, but not as wrong as it could have been.
The result was the same.
Binding.
Weakness.
Some arcane, mortal contraption around the wrists that drained magicka faster than it could recover, even with the surprisingly deep reserves.
Time passed, unremarked. Tiid frul.
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A bright green glow woke her, and she slumped into relaxed placidity as the foreign magicka melted into her, sweet murmurs soothing her to peaceful compliance as she opened her eyes.
Neither of the Dunmer in the room (bedroom?) were looking at her, though the woman’s fingers still trailed tendrils of haunting, soothing green light.
“That Pacify should last about six hours, so make sure you’ve got her trussed up again before it wears off. Or don’t. So long as I get that dagger you promised me, I couldn’t care less if she ripped your dick off and fed it to you.”
“Charming as always, Salyilu. I expected better than six hours from an ‘expert’, though. I don’t know if that’s worth the cost of the soul gem I’ll need for your enchantment…” That voice…He was…Familiar?
“Your new toy has a magic resistance, congratulations. Find me and I’ll charm her again, but you’d better keep your end of the bargain.” The woman paused one step outside the door and looked back over her black-clad shoulder. “Ineris. I don’t suppose you care to hear the lasting effects of keeping something under Illusion magic for so long?”
One hand already on the door, Ineris asked, “Will it kill her?”, and at the Illusionist’s negative answer, curtly said; “No.” and closed the heavy door, locking it with a harsh metal scrape.
He turned to her and smiled, white teeth and creased eyes, coming in close to release the ropes binding the thick shackles around her wrists together. His hands lingered, the gray of his skin only a couple shades lighter than her scales, his fingers tracing feather-light over the irritated wounds beneath the carved ebony shackles. She shivered, but was otherwise still, complacent under the hold of the spell.
“Hmm, let’s get you out of these rags, my dear. Stand for me.” Standing, she was at least a full head taller than him, but the Dunmer only appeared more delighted as he stripped her bare of the roughspun tunic and trousers, only ever hesitating at the leather binding her jaws, until he took that, too. He ‘tsk’ed at the blood that immediately began seeping from the wound, but smiled as he watched it trickle down her neck.
“Go lay on the bed. Belly down.”
She did. Her mind remained blissfully quiet the entire time.
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The woman came back later, hours after Ineris had gone, having left her bound securely in one of his room’s two chairs. There was a new dagger at her hip, some wicked Orcish thing that gleamed with faint blue enchantment. Her eyes were such a deep red as to almost be black, her lips painted to match—pursed tight, as she studied the state Ineris had left her in. It only took the dark elf a moment to grab one of the furs from the bed and throw it over her lap, hiding the mess of her blood and his seed pooled between her unclothed thighs.
“I don’t have anything against you,” said the woman in that accursed accent, ignoring the way she was straining against her binds, aching body screaming to get free, to hurt, to kill, to do anything but wait for him to come back. “It really isn’t personal. Ineris is the best Enchanter in the keep, and I needed a new dagger.”
She snarled as best she could with her mouth bound shut once more. Lies, wretched lies.
A brief, strange emotion flashed over the other woman’s face, strands of glowing green magicka coiling around her hand like creeping vines.
The door swung open, and Ineris came in, arterial-red eyes lighting up when they landed on her. He was a sick one.
The spell connected, peaceful compliance smothering thought like the thickest mud.
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Green light. The heavy slam of his door, scrape and click of the lock.
Ineris moved her chair to the table before pushing her to sit, gone briefly and then reappearing with a bloodstained sack in his hands. From it he drew an entire arm, scales dull and flaking but still retaining a color somewhere between red and orange.
Her eyes stung when the leather strap was unwound, blurring the vision of gray-skinned arms reaching around her, hands carving a chunk of red, red meat from the limb, holding it delicately before her nose with two fingers.
“Open up, my dear, we must keep you fed,” the Dunmer practically sang, free hand hot where it cradled her jaw. He pulled her head back until she could feel his heartbeat, fast and hard.
She obeyed, of course she did, why wouldn’t she? And it was good, meat rich and soft on her tongue, the same flavor as the blood that seeped from the weeping wounds caused by the strap. She was opening her mouth for another piece almost before the first was in her empty, aching stomach.
Ineris laughed and laughed and laughed, but fed her until the arm was naught but red, red bones.
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Green light.
The Dunmer woman –Sal, Salyi..?– leaned in close, the gleam of the new enchantment on the silver pendant around her neck a pleasant, hypnotizing distraction. The deep crimson of the woman’s eyes flickered in the torchlight, her lips thinning the longer her gaze sought and failed to make a connection. She sighed and moved away.
“I used to wonder, you know,” the other woman spoke, and it was only then that she realized that Ineris wasn’t in the room at all. The Illusionist never spoke to her otherwise. Probably. “If he had taken to one of the Corners, because surely a madness like his couldn’t be a mortal sickness. I still think that, though now perhaps it is two Corners.”
She blinked and pulled once against the binds that kept her restrained on the reeking chair, aching and starving and almost blissfully thoughtless. The elf looked away, the green-tinged gray of her knuckles paling as her fists clenched.
“If you’re still in there, I am sorry. Look. Look!” The woman unsheathed the wicked, gleaming dagger from her belt and tucked it behind the wardrobe. “I’m sorry.”
The woman left in a quick swish of black robes, not once looking back.
Within her, something stirred, hungry and cunning. Her eyes didn’t leave the spot the blade rested until Ineris returned.
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Green light.
The Illusionist’s gaze locked with hers, searching, until Ineris snapped at the woman to leave.
“Get on the bed,” he ordered tersely, and she did, but there was something in her head, a feeling, a thought, something that growled.
She had barely settled before he was on her, one hand gripped tight into feathers and forcing her to fight for breath through the hay-stuffed pillow, the fingers of the other pushed roughly into her, slick with oil but painful all the same. Barely a minute later he had buried himself to the hilt, movements fast and rough, forcing what little air she had out in hitched, hissing exhales.
He was silent but for grunts of effort, growls on his deepest thrusts, a groan when finally, finally he peaked. Only then did his grip on her head loosen, allowing her just enough freedom to pull in desperate, heaving breaths through blood-tacky nostrils. His full weight rested limply across her back, his softening member only then slipping out, leaving behind an ache that never seemed to disappear while the growling in her head grew louder, louder, louder.
And while the Dunmer slept, the forced placidity and calm was wearing off, and she stared at the reeking chair stained with the torment this elf inflicted on her, and her stomach turned with hunger and hate so twisted together that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Ineris had grown complacent. She wasn’t bound. He was sleeping.
Slowly, slowly, by the smallest of increments, she slipped out from beneath him, and he didn’t so much as twitch. She stared down at him, the bare expanse of slate gray skin splayed loose across the stained furs, and raked her claws down her jaws, tearing the strip of leather from her face, heedless of the burning lines of fire left behind.
The whim was a mockery of the way he first touched her; gentle claws trailed over skin just a few shades lighter than her scales, up his arm and shoulder, feather-light over his neck, up his cheek and over gently twitching eyelids. And as arterial-red eyes cracked open, still pleasure-hazed, she lunged, bit, tore, blood and air foaming pink where her teeth buried deep in his neck—shake, shake, rip, swallow.
The horror in his eyes remained until she plucked them from their sockets and ate them, too. She ate until she couldn’t eat anymore, hollow stomach rounded and aching, red bones smeared across the furs. Only then did she stop, to glory in finally being free of the spell, feelings her own once more. But her head was echoing with an emptiness of knowledge, of purpose, and…
There were other things there. Things that may have been there the whole time, but weren’t there before.
Go, said one of them, old and cunning and cruel in a way that was alien, true to it but maybe not to her. Take the right of conquest and leave.
Hurry, said the other, quavering, laughing and crying, full of strange knowledge –prophecy?– but even more alien than the first, so very unused to the cruelty inherent to men and mer. Go south. To Riften. To the Warrens. Wait. Hurry, go, go…
And… Neither offered bad advice, as far as she could tell. And so she ransacked Ineris’ room of everything worth slipping into a knapsack, all his enchanted treasures, and left, guided through unfamiliar halls to freedom by the crying seer, fueled by the cruel satisfaction of the ancient monster. Both tucked into the vast emptiness of her head where something else ought to be, but wasn’t. Both bleeding at the edges, much as she was.
Freedom at last, they said as they slipped out into the cold night, moons dark and sky painted in blues and greens. Finally.