It definitely might have been a warehouse at some point in time, though it definitely wasn’t now. Sand, drifting in through the open windows and doorway, partially covered the empty crates stacked haphazardly in the large main room. There was no sign of Lucya, or of any other human‘s presence; but with the sandstorm still howling around the place that was no great surprise. The corner to Dale’s right had side-by-side wardrobes set into the wall nearest him. It was the logical spot for an office, or perhaps a small bedroom; seeing no door into it, he stepped closer to examine the wardrobes.
There were several pieces of fine-quality clothing in the nearer cabinet: an odd thing to find in a deserted building, he thought. When he opened the second wardrobe, though, he grinned. There was nothing inside, but when he tapped on the back panel, the echoes of the sound from beyond and below verified his suspicion that he’d found a hidden door.
After pushing the panel aside, he discovered that the “room” behind it was simply an open space not much larger than a closet. It was neither an office nor a bedroom. He stepped in and sighed, frustrated; then his foot caught on a lip of wood in the floor. He looked down and grinned again. In the center of this closet was a wooden hatch, partially covered over with sand that had infiltrated past the edges of the wardrobes. He cleared the sand away as best he could with his hands, pondering what Lucya might have been searching for in such a desolate location.
Maybe it’s still housing wares. I wonder what wares would warrant a secret entrance and a hatch, though, rather than a simple ladder. Well, I suppose it’s time to find out.
He opened the hatch, turned, and started down the ladder under it; then he froze for a moment. His nose and brow wrinkled at what, facing the cellar’s wall, he could not yet see but could clearly smell.
Blood?
He reached the bottom and turned, gasping in spite of himself at the sight before him. It was a storage room, to be certain, loaded with crates, barrels, and heavy linen sacks. It was also a room spattered from one side to the other with blood. Near the opposite wall from where he stood was a seemingly ordinary soul gem holder holding what was absolutely not an ordinary soul gem. This gem glittered and shone with a magic wavering between dark red and bright pink; while he felt certain that gem needed to come with him, he first needed to investigate the other out-of-place thing in the room: Lucya’s body.
She was clearly dead and had been for some time. Here in the bone-dry desert air in an underground room, though, her body was still in good condition save for the obvious knife wounds in her chest. The pool of blood directly under her, and likely the splatters beyond her, were of her blood. There were other blood spills, though, he thought: elongated, teardrop-shaped marks that began from just in front of where she must have stood, extending toward his current position and ending in a puddle ruining the carpet upon which he stood. Whoever had killed Lucya had not done so unscathed. Unusual, he thought, for a Dark Brotherhood assassin to be caught off-guard like this. At least she fought back.
That assumes that she and the others are legitimately Brotherhood, that is. With every moment that passes I think it more likely they are not.
He gathered up the gemstone. While it didn’t stop shimmering when he removed it from the stand, it didn’t harm him in any way. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking for anything that might tell him what he was seeing, but there was nothing obvious to see.
“I’m sorry, Lucya,” he murmured to the corpse. “I have no way to bury you right now. I’ll send some of the initiates. You’ll be safe here.”
And then he almost dropped the gem. It seemed to pulse, somehow, almost as if speaking to him or acknowledging his words. He stared at it again.
I’ve heard of memory gems before, gems that can record what was being said around them. And obviously, soul gems hold, well, souls. Could this possibly be Lucya? Or part of her, somehow?
The gem pulsed once more, warming his hands. He shuddered, and slipped the gem into his pack. It would be useful if this was in fact Lucya’s soul gem. Maybe she could guide him to her. But it was beyond unsettling, nonetheless.
As he climbed up the ladder and pondered having just spoken aloud to a corpse, Dale wondered what was getting into him, aside from sand. It was not only still storming outside but was also the dead of night. He could only barely make out the shapes of the nearest stones, and the vague forms of what might have been nearby mountaintops. The howling wind made everything worse. Even with his keen, vampiric night vision he wasn’t certain where his feet were going to land next: dune, stone, grass or crevasse.
It seemed to take hours to reach the Sanctuary. Every time he crested a dune, or came upon a tuft of grass appearing from the murk as the winds slackened for a moment, he jumped. He jumped again as he passed a small oasis – or at least he assumed that was what drew the desert wolves that howled at him, making the skin on his neck and back crawl. When he finally slipped into the sanctuary he nearly collapsed in gratitude for the sudden, welcome quiet.
Tenerio was doing his best to hold up the wall behind the “desk,” as usual, and barely shifted when Dale approached.
“Yes?” he said.
The tone of his voice made Dale bristle. He’d expended more time and energy doing errands for this group than anyone else in the building, and he was, as Cicero had been so happy to announce to all, the Listener. This man, though…
He ground his teeth. “I’m well, thank you for asking,” he snapped before taking a deep breath. “I found the warehouse, such as it is. I’m afraid that Lucya is dead. We’ll need to send people with a shovel to give her a proper burial. I had nothing with me. And I found this, as well,” he added, holding the gem out but not giving it to Tenerio.
“No!” Tenerio breathed, looking shocked. “That’s really bad.” He frowned.
There was something about his expression that didn’t feel right to Dale. This wasn’t a frown of grief. Not at all. This was shock, to be sure, but for some other reason than the death of a colleague. What had Tenerio been expecting from Lucya?
He crossed his arms and took a stance in front of Tenerio. The man was effectively trapped there, in his corner, and he would either answer the question or wish he had.
“What is so bad about it, other than the fact that we’ve lost a member?”
“Uh…” Tenerio’s eyes shifted back and forth a few times before he met Dale’s gaze. “She was looking for an ancient artifact. I think she was on the verge of finding it. That’s why she went to the warehouse.”
“Alright,” Dale said, nodding. “That makes sense, although why an ancient artifact would be in a warehouse that clearly has seen recent use is a puzzlement to me. Usually such things are buried in the corner of a cavern, or in some necromancer’s crypt far beneath a city. A safe spot.”
Tenerio looked baffled for a moment, but cleared his throat to continue speaking.
“She told me it was vampire related.”
Dale felt the hair on his neck prickle in alarm. I thought I was doing so well, being so careful, hiding it… Does he know?
“Vampires? Why would a Dark Brotherhood member be looking for…” He trailed off, realizing what he’d just said.
The Dark Brotherhood and vampires.
The Crimson Scars. Could it possibly be?
Tenerio had apparently not realized that Dale had stopped speaking. Dale could hear the man’s heart hammering. Tenerio was afraid, but Dale didn’t know whether it was fear of losing the artifact, or fear of the vampires that might have it.
“I’m pretty sure that must be what got her killed,” Tenerio said quietly. “We have to find out what she knew. But how?”
Dale looked down at the gem and chewed his lip as he thought. He was pretty sure that his guess about Lucya’s soul calling to him from it was accurate, but he had no idea where to begin looking for her. The gem still pulsed with its reddish energy. Normal soul gems pulsed too, but with a lighter, blue-colored energy. There was something important about that, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Soul gems. Souls. What is it about souls…
Suddenly he had a memory, from what seemed like an entire lifetime ago but hadn’t been, really. Vyctyna had just finished giving him a thorough tongue-lashing for being rude to Serana. Dale felt a smirk forming on his lips as he remembered how thoroughly Serana’s boots had smacked the floor on the way out of the room, after he’d said he preferred younger women; but Tyna had been angry, and Agryn at least annoyed. Still, they’d continued showing him around the castle while Agryn described the benefits – and drawbacks – to potentially moving to the North Tower Brynjolf had told them about. They’d gone out to the courtyard, on their way there, and Vyctyna had pointed at the moon dial.
“That’s another way to get to Lady Valerica’s study,” she said. “It goes down, and under the courtyard, and then if you follow the rooms up you end up in the study.”
“Really,” Agryn had said, sounding disinterested. “And what is the significance of that?”
Vyctyna shook her head. “The portal? To the Soul Cairn? Remember that huge saga, Bryn telling us how he and Serana and Andante had to…” She had trailed off, giving Dale a mortified glance. “Sorry, Dale, I keep forgetting.”
He had shrugged it off and laughed, insincerely. Standing to the side, silently fuming over once again having his resemblance to his father rubbed in his face, he’d nonetheless listened while his two mentors had discussed the Soul Cairn, what was there, and whether or not they would ever have need of this entrance to it when they could just go through the castle.
“Unless you’re right and we can’t trust her,” Vyctyna had mentioned. “That would make this back way in really handy.”
That’s where the memory stopped, but that was fine. Dale looked down at the gem once more and nodded.
“You have thought of something?” Tenerio asked.
“I believe so. This energy – it is almost as though I can feel her soul, or part of it anyway. I think I might know a place where she could be. Or her spirit, at any rate. I’ll need to return to Skyrim to get there.”
“If you’re sure about that, then I trust you, Listener.”
Dale couldn’t help himself; he glared at Tenerio, knowing by the nervous sweat that began emerging on the man’s forehead that his expression was as icy cold as the cavern where he’d killed the ancient vampire. His patience was running dry. He’d had more respect from Sayma, the former Listener, than he’d gotten from Tenerio after being summoned here like a lowly initiate. “You’d best trust me, sir. I’m the Listener. I’m your superior. I listen to the Night Mother. You do not.”
Tenerio’s eyes opened wider at that, and he chuckled nervously. “Of course, Listener. What I mean to say is… try to find her. Try to make contact with her and find out what she knew.”
“That was my intention,” Dale said through clenched jaws. He was angry. Disproportionately angry to the situation.
I must be exhausted, he thought. There’s no reason to be so outraged that this man won’t offer up his information without prompting, or acknowledge my position. But I’m being treated like some hired grunt. It’s one thing for me to accept assignments from Agryn. He’s my superior, and my sire. This person, though. I don’t even know whether he belongs here.
Dale tried to still his mind, taking a deep breath and blowing it out. “After I rest for a few hours,” he said. “Running through that sandstorm was taxing,” he added, peering at Tenerio through narrowed eyes, hoping his point was taken.
“I’m counting on you, Listener,” Tenerio said. He seemed not to have registered Dale’s annoyance at all. Dale tsk’d and turned away from him, trying to hide his disgust.
He moved silently through the workroom, where one initiate was busily adding buckles to a piece of leather armor and another sharpened a dagger. In the next room, the other two initiates rested quietly on the cots to either side of the hatch to his quarters. He’d almost reached the hatch when he looked down at the initiate to the left, deeply asleep, and came to a sudden, nearly overwhelming realization: he was famished. He’d consumed a blood potion at some point, but it had been some time since he’d had fresh, warm, metallic-sweet human blood…
He could hear the blood murmuring peacefully through the woman’s vessels. He watched her breathing and tried to match his own breathing to hers. In… out. In… out. It was almost hypnotic. Sweet, warm human blood. Hungry vampires. Tired, hungry vampires in the blazing hot Hammerfell desert, not in ice caverns or deep beneath the Throat of the World. Vampires and the Dark Brotherhood, was it? Is that what Tenerio feared – having a hungry vampire feast on his person? It almost had to be that, didn’t it?
It was as though he was standing outside himself, looking down at a young, hungry, angry vampire considering his next actions. It was a very hungry vampire, and a very angry one, indeed, and this initiate was laid out like an offering. He nodded. Coldly, detached from any emotion, Dale knelt beside the sleeping woman, reached for her dagger, and calmly drew it across his palm. It didn’t hurt him, oddly enough; perhaps it was that he was outside himself, watching the ritual happen.
“Here you are, my dear,” he heard himself whispering to the initiate. “Let us share blood.”
He leaned forward and drank deeply from the woman’s throat, following by dribbling the blood from his own wound into her mouth and over the holes he had pierced in her. He closed his eyes and felt a great surge of energy flowing between them, from him to her, a lesser copy of the gift of the great machine beneath Coldhaven. He whispered again. “You are reborn a vampire. Arise, and serve your maker.”
The woman moaned and stirred restlessly, and Dale’s eyes flew open. He winced, and looked down at his bleeding palm, then frantically took in the scene around himself. Finally he scanned the woman and saw the two undeniable, blood-smeared puncture wounds in her neck. He had to get away from her, right then, before Tenerio or any of his other Initiates witnessed what he had just done. He darted to the hatch and then down the ladder, stumbling to the bed and lying down on it, trembling, eyes wide.
What have I done?
Have I just become… a sire?
He forced himself to close his eyes, to focus on his own fatigue and his need to rest, to appreciate the warmth of the blood he’d taken from the woman he’d just turned. But he couldn’t still his mind from wondering whether the blood-red energy from deep beneath Coldhaven was somehow, impossibly, related to the red soul gem he had taken from nearby Lucya’s corpse. He’d been changed, empowered without his consent or foreknowledge, and he had just done the same to the poor initiate upstairs in Tenerio’s “sanctuary.” Lucya and Tenerio had been searching for something that had to do with vampires. Lucya had died. And now there was a vampire in Tenerio’s sanctuary.
His mind raced in circles for what felt like hours, unable to make sense of everything that had happened to him since the courier had reached him in Coldhaven. He desperately wanted it to make sense. Around and around he went, more and more fatigued as he realized he simply didn’t understand. Then, just as sleep neared, he smiled.
A vampire in Tenerio’s sanctuary.
I can use this.
It was relatively easy for Dale to approach Castle Volkihar from the north and to slip into the most ancient part of it unobserved by anyone – but particularly by Serana. He had been as quiet as the grave making his way through to the courtyard and then following the path Vyctyna had described, and yet he still breathed a sigh of relief reaching the door to Valerica’s quarters. Which part of the room was the portal was obvious from the moment he stepped through the door. Thin, stone stairs led down toward, and then disappeared into, a circular opening in the floor. Purple magical energies emanated from the opening, the depth of which was utterly impossible to tell.
This must be the place. Now for the hard part. I know they all told me it was safe for undead to come and go to the Soul Cairn but so help me I do not like portals.
He’d never been formally introduced to Serana’s mother, but there was nobody else the elegant woman quietly reading in a corner could be. She looked up at him as he headed for the entrance to the portal, and nodded, recognizing one of her own kind, but neither rose nor spoke. Dale nodded back and quietly made his way to the oddly-shaped stairwell. He hesitated for a moment, looking down at the uneven, broken steps into a circle leading into unfathomable, magical nothingness.
I don’t like portals.
He sighed, took another deep breath, and started down. As usual, for a moment the world went black and he had to suppress a truly embarrassing shriek. After a moment of disorientation, though, he found himself at the top of another broken stair into a bleak, strange world the likes of which he had never seen. It was – appropriately, he thought – the colors of death: black and gray, with an occasional mottled brown stone here and there. The sky, though, was the same color as the energies that had arisen from the portal in Castle Volkihar – gray, blue, and purple. It also reeked. The many piles of bones he saw dotting the landscape were, unsurprisingly, decaying. Dale found a shudder running up his spine and frowned at himself. It wasn’t like him to be so rattled.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like me to turn a sleeping woman, either. Nothing about this is normal, not in any way.
He had no idea where Lucya’s soul might be. All he could do was explore the Soul Cairn, following the vague, varying strength of the pulsing energies within the gem he carried. Stronger, he assumed, meant closer, and weaker meant he was moving in the wrong direction. He crisscrossed the region nearest the circular staircase, getting a very slight sense that he should be heading to his right. East? Maybe, though under the purple sky of this dimension of Oblivion it was impossible to tell for certain. Nor could he tell which of the glowing spots of light before him might be souls. Some, it seemed, were simply pools of magical energy. Others glowed brighter, lighter, and moved. He spotted one such movement and darted toward it, only to find that it was a wisp – a tiny fragment of a soul that had been used but not totally depleted, able to move but without self-awareness. He ran away from the wisp, grinding his teeth and frowning.
He spotted the glow of an intact soul, much like those he’d encountered at Rannveig’s Fast, and darted toward it only to discover that it was a man, not a woman, and a very hopeless man at that. The soul stared at him with an expression that spoke volumes: Don’t talk to me. It doesn’t matter any more. Dale again gritted his teeth and ran on, toward a gap in the long wall crossing the Cairn. Perhaps Lucya was somewhere on the other side. Perhaps…
Perhaps if I can find her I will stop hearing “I’m sorry! This isn’t what I want!” every time I see something that looks ghostly. Perhaps I will stop thinking about the souls drained in Coldhaven’s Dwemer laboratory.
I’m sorry. It wasn’t what I wanted.
There was a huge structure, maybe a castle, across the desolate space from him and he made for it. About halfway to his destination, around a small open structure, half a dozen black shapes rose from the surrounding bone dust. Skeletons, it seemed, but not of a kind he’d ever seen before. The nearest of them drew a bow and fired at Dale, but he stepped aside and sprinted forward, muscle memory taking over as he slashed at the creature with his short blades. As the skeleton disintegrated back into the dust from which it had come, its soul exploded and rushed into a gem in Dale’s pack, obeying the power of his blade. He stopped, stock-still for a moment, and grimaced, his head pounding.
I think I’m going to be sick.
He had no time to be sick, though. There were four or five more creatures trying very hard to kill him. He simply reacted. Where there had once been Dale Perdeti, the Listener, there now was a huge and very angry Vampire Lord that summoned a pair of gargoyles and, once they were engaged, dispatched the enemies they didn’t attack, using his blood magic.
Being in this form made traveling easier, as well. He covered the distance to the castle-like structure in no time and found a huge door leading to a large, and very empty, arena. There was nobody there, and nothing of note but piles of discarded bones and the faint whispers of battles long ago fought. He left the yard and returned to the vast, gray despair of the Cairn. Scanning the horizon was pointless; there was nothing to tell him what direction he needed to go. He closed his eyes and focused on the gem he carried and listened as it told him there. To your left. Near the edge. Then he flew.
He flew, and he floated, and then he changed form and ran as a human back and forth across this part of the Soul Cairn so many times that he began to wonder if he had been wrong all this time about Lucya’s soul even being here. But finally there was a pulse of energy, stronger, with a distinct direction. There, to the left of him, as he’d thought before, was a small stone structure: dark gray, with an arched, wooden door in its center. The closer he got to it the more completely his doubts fell away. He stepped up to it and opened the door.
It was bleak, inside, as tiny as its exterior suggested. It was a small, dark, lifeless, mostly-empty prison of gray stone containing only three things: a dead magic circle, a stone chest shoved up against the far wall, and, standing before it, a soul.
“Lucya?” he said quietly, not wanting to alarm her.
“You!” she said, her voice hoarse and wispy, as though she had just regained consciousness and it was an effort to make the words audible. “Listener! How? What happened? What is this place?” She sounded more distressed with each moment and with each glance around the room.
“Lucya, this is … a room, a building in the Soul Cairn. You know about the Soul Cairn, yes? Your soul was placed into a gem when… well, I’m sure you are aware of what that means.”
She paused for a moment, blinking at him, and then drew in a sharp breath. “I… remember. I remember my… death. I remember.”
Dale sighed. “I’m very sorry, Lucya. I found your body, and the gem. It’s clear that you put up a very good fight. But in the end, you’re here, and I’m here to see whether we can find out why you were killed.” I should be angry, as the Listener, that you allowed yourself to be killed. But I am convinced that you had no real training, no real direction, and therefore have no real responsibility for this. You probably expected to return to the Void, as we’re taught, expecting Sithis to take your soul. It… isn’t what you wanted.
She nodded. “I had found an artifact. The Crimson Eviscerator – a Crimson Scar dagger.”
Dale’s eyes widened in spite of his efforts to maintain calm. He’d seen a reference to that dagger in the materials at the Coldhaven Sanctuary, among the listing of people, and places, and things associated with this very old branch of the Brotherhood. So it was real? It still existed?
Fortunately, Lucya hadn’t seemed to notice his sudden excitement. “The vampires were also trying to locate that artifact, but I was faster. It is still in the cave it was sealed in. The vampires tortured me to find out where it was, but I managed to slip a dagger into my outfit, and I…” She trailed off, and Dale’s mouth sagged open for a moment as he realized what she meant.
So the wounds on her body were not actually their doing, but her own way to keep the secret.
“That was brave of you, Lucya,” Dale said. “I saw evidence that you fought hard. And I assume the vampire body I found was also your doing. But who are these vampires? Are they…” Dale stopped himself. Caring about which faction of vampires was after the Eviscerator was perilously close to revealing that he was himself a vampire. And if he was right about the Hammerfell sanctuary, these people would not necessarily know about Babette, or that any other vampire Brotherhood members existed. A human Listener should merely be concerned that there were any vampires at all trying to find this artifact. “Why do they want this weapon in the first place?” he finished.
He shouldn’t have worried, though. Maybe in life Lucya would have caught the nuances of his question but in her current state she was doing well to formulate thoughts at all. She shook her head. “The weapon in itself isn’t very strong, but it holds a symbolic value for those who want to rebuild the Crimson Scars. A tool, to rally vampires from different backgrounds under the same cause.”
Fingers of ice ran up Dale’s spine. Rally vampires from different backgrounds? That was what Agryn and Vyctyna wanted. It was apparently what Agryn’s sire Edwyn Wyckham had wanted, at least originally. It was definitely not what Lady Serana wanted, apparently. But rebuilding the Crimson Scars? That was absolutely what Camryn and the Coldhaven Sanctuary wanted. And… perhaps…
“We cannot let that happen!” Lucya’s voice was stronger with her obvious conviction, and her sudden exclamation startled him. “If I tell you the location of the artifact, will you go get it?”
Dale felt a smile – a small, cold smile – break across his lips. “Oh yes. I definitely will.”
“Then go, Listener!” she cried. “The artifact is located in a cave, in the Alik’r desert. I will show you where, on your map.” She frowned for a moment, then nodded. “Use my soul gem to open the way to the artifact. And don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will. When you feel ready, go out. Explore this place. It’s – well, it’s not lovely, but there certainly are a great many things to look at. And there are other souls out there, that I saw on my way to find you. Perhaps you’ll find someone to talk to.”
“The Dark Brotherhood counts on you,” Lucya said.
A part of Dale wanted to rage. Of course they counted on him. He was, as far as he was aware, the only being with the ability to speak to the Night Mother. Tenerio counted on him because he was a spineless, lazy man and likely a pretender, and because Tenerio didn’t have the skills to do this himself. But Dale couldn’t bring himself to be angry with Lucya. She’d only been doing a thing that she believed the Night Mother had ordered.
“Take care, Lucya,” he said instead.
He sighed heavily after stepping back out into the Soul Cairn, orienting himself, and heading back toward the circular staircase back to Castle Volkihar. There were a million questions and another million conflicting emotions quarreling in his mind like angry cats beneath a harvest moon. It was good that it was a long trip back south to Falkreath and then through the portal to Hammerfell. Maybe he could find a state of calm by the time he arrived there. Only if he was calm could he foresee getting to the bottom of all this before he lost his control.