Opportunities

Eleven: The Love You’ve Been Hiding From Me

I was struggling with all my puny might to drag him inside to safety when Zedrick arrived and carried him to a bed for me.

“This is him, then?” he asked, looking down at the unconscious Dunmer.

“Yes!” I cried, flailing uselessly. “Potions!”

Zedrick cleared his throat. “Better to take the arrows out while he can’t feel it.”

I could barely see for – oh, for the tears, that was why. “Do it then! Hurry up, while I find the potions.” I knelt and started to fumble through my bag as Zedrick positioned himself over Othrelos and, with a grunt of effort, heaved out one arrow and then the other.

I slammed down two bottles of healing potion on the floor next to me. “And one for poison. Where’s the one for poison?” Zedrick reached down and took it out of the bag for me, and I sobbed once, then pulled myself back together with a growl. I watched and felt helpless while the pirate gathered pillows from the other beds and used them to prop Othrelos up a bit, so it would be easier to pour the healing potions down his throat.

“So it’s all clear now?” I hissed, and he nodded. “Good. Set up a watch. Leave me alone up here until I call for you.”

He hesitated. “We didn’t know,” he said at last. “He fired on us.”

“I know that. Go downstairs.”

When he was gone, I sat down next to Othrelos, as best I could on the edge of the narrow bed, and poured the antidote into his mouth first, slowly, stroking his throat with my free hand to try to force him to swallow though unconscious. I followed with the first of the healing potions, and then thought he might need more than I’d gotten out, and fumbled through my bag again for yet another, and set it next to the other one I hadn’t yet used.

The effect was not immediately obvious. I started to fidget and whimper frantically to myself about what I was going to do if I couldn’t revive him. But then he stirred, breathing more deeply and moving his arms a little. I pressed in on him with the second healing potion, and now he swallowed it of his own accord. He breathed a little easier, moved more smoothly, and opened his eyes to look at me.

Shocked, of course. “Lum,” he rasped, his voice weak. “What in Azura’s name are you doing here?”

I didn’t let myself scream at him while he was still faint. “Looking for you. I heard all about the mission from your uncle.” He sighed and closed his eyes, slumping back into the pillows. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would never have wanted this if I had known!”

“When he told me – how much – it was the only idea I had.”

“But why – you’re not dying any more, are you?”

He looked strangely at me, gave what he could of a laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re not getting another potion until you tell me why you did all this. You could have just helped me get the money. You could have stalled for time. You could have told me no. Anything else!”

He winced, probably still from physical pain as well as my sharpness. “I just wanted to be sure you would be safe. You shouldn’t yell at me.”

“But you could have died, you idiot mer! What was I supposed to do with myself if you died?” His eyes widened. “Why did you do it?” I insisted.

An even heavier sigh than the first one. “Because I love you, Lum.”

I handed over the next potion and sat there, stunned. He didn’t drink it right away: he just held it as he stared through me.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I muttered.

His look when he answered was soft but a little guarded. “Would it have done me any good?”

The tears were threatening to come back, and I rubbed at my face a little as I laughed at him. “So, what, you were going to wait for me to say it first? I wasn’t even sure what it was. You know that I was raised by wolves.”

He took my hand, his eyes uncertain. “Lum…?”

“You’re everything to me!” I snarled. “Drink your damned potion!”

He obeyed, too surprised not to. Then I climbed on top of him and started to kiss him. He groaned and grabbed me to him urgently, his eyes sliding shut. He tasted like medicine, but I didn’t care. I licked it from his lips as I ran my hands up and down his chest. Up and down over the stupid uniform that had almost gotten him killed – I yanked it open and bent down to kiss the chest wound that had already healed over into a fading dent in his skin.

“Is this safe?” he whispered, but his hands were already in my hair, pulling loose my braids.

“No one got out, and my people are watching.” I eased the shirt away from his shoulders, revealing the other closed wound in his shoulder.

“When did you get people?”

I grinned and licked his collarbone. “When you weren’t looking.”

He laughed a little. “I missed you.” He tried to sit the rest of the way up to embrace me, but I pushed him back down.

“Stay there. You’re still healing.”

He stroked a finger along my jawline and smiled. “You’re still vicious.”

With a cheerful nod I rose and peeled his trousers away from him, then hurried through stripping off my own clothes and returned to his side. As I climbed back into bed, I crawled over him slowly, pausing to take his erection into my mouth and caress it with my tongue. By the time I straddled him again he was panting, and his eyes were hazy with desire.

He pulled me down into another kiss, biting gently at my lips. “Lum,” he whispered. “Do you really?”

I giggled at how easy he made it for me. “Do I really what?”

He growled and pulled at my hair. “Do you really have to be such a brat?”

Relenting, I brought my lips to his ear. “Yes, O. I love you too.” He smiled and sighed, and I reached down to draw him into me. It felt so wonderful to have him again, and I moved back and forth over him slowly, reveling in the sensation.

But I didn’t let myself go enough to lose the tease. I grabbed both of his nipples and growled, “So from now on you’re going to tell me everything, right?” I tugged, making him gasp.

His eyes narrowed, a mischievous look. “As you say.” His hand swept up my thigh to my hip, and then he brought his thumb onto my clit and began to move it in time with me. When I froze for a second, shocked by pleasure, so did he. “Keep moving,” he grinned, “or I’ll stop.”

It was more and more difficult. He knew me well enough to match his pressure to my responses, and as I rode him my limbs started to tremble. He watched me struggle, and smiled, and kept himself passive except for his hand.

All my nerves were trying to fire at once, and I needed to stop, to let go of control for one second so I could orgasm. He saw my hesitation before I had even slowed down, and shook his head. “Keep moving!”

I was shaking. “O – I can’t – ” I gasped and reared back, and now he sat up and placed his hand at the small of my back, happily accepting my desperate kisses as he adjusted himself, drawing up his legs. Then he laid me down with my head at the foot of the bed, and took control of our rhythm, thrusting wonderfully hard now that he’d gotten even with me. I clawed into his back without fear of going too far: he didn’t mind even when I made him bleed.

I loved him. For a moment I couldn’t even remember that there was such a thing as other people. Then his eyes widened, and he gasped and froze, and I felt his body tense and release. I pulled him down into one more long, slow kiss as he stroked my hair.

He nipped at the side of my neck. “If you and your people get out now, they may not follow you.”

I twined my fingers into his hair. “I beg your pardon?”

“I can’t go, Lum. This is too important, even if it was my uncle’s idea. Drothan is crazy, and if he’s right about this place he’s going to end up with an army and a weapon from a Daedric Lord.”

“Then I’ll stay and take it from him. That’s what I do.”

“It’s not that simple, or I’d have done it already. He’s sealed himself in somewhere down there, and nobody knows how to even reach him. And there’s something else wrong. This place is huge, and old, and – there’s talk of vampires.”

“These are all reasons you shouldn’t be here alone, O. I brought you reinforcements, and we’re not leaving. You can lead us in if you have to stay, but I’m not going anywhere without you again.”

He smirked and shook his head, helpless in the face of my logic. “You’d think it would take me more than a couple of months to forget how stubborn you are.”

“You’d think.”

We dressed and came down the stairs, to find that Zedrick had posted himself at the barracks door, sending the others to watch the adjoining tunnels. He looked Othrelos up and down, his arms crossed. “So you’re Othrelos, then. You killed two of my men.”

Othrelos shifted his weight uncomfortably. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who you were.”

Zedrick stood firm for a moment, but then he shrugged. “Sure, nothing personal. And Melly almost got you, so I guess that makes it even. Welcome aboard.” He offered his hand to shake, and Othrelos took it, not without hesitation. “Too bad about Yinz’r, but nobody liked Scurvy John much anyway.” With that, he stepped away and started waving to the sentries to gather back to us.

“Scurvy John,” Othrelos muttered to me. “Your people are pirates?” He frowned in confusion. “Land pirates?”

“Usually ship pirates,” I smiled. “This is a personal favor.”

“Favor nothing!” Zedrick said cheerfully as he came back toward us. “You should see what some of these bastards have got. The take from this is going to be amazing.” Othrelos raised his eyebrows at the pirate’s avaricious grin.

My love’s reception with the rest of the group was mixed. Kovan accepted him with his kind’s usual racial camaraderie; Melliwin, with a cool, professional nod and a touch to her bow, grudging respect for a fellow marksman; but Jak smiled with a hint of malice I didn’t like.

“I hope that was worth making us wait around for you,” he said to Othrelos. “Of course, it usually is, with her.”

Zedrick shot him a warning look. He was always the more sensible one. “Shut up, Jak.”

Jak’s eyes were still on Othrelos. “What? You’re not the jealous type, are you, Dunmer? You’ve picked the wrong girl if you are.”

Oh, gods, not a fight. Not here. That was the last thing we needed.

But Othrelos waved it off with a sickly smile. “I don’t have the right to be jealous. We didn’t have that kind of arrangement.”

Jak looked a little disappointed as Zedrick hurried him aside for stern lecturing. Othrelos took the opportunity to whisper into my ear. “That said, it’s a conversation I’d like to have later.” I nodded and gave him a little hug of relief. “You have been with that man, then,” he added, and watched the two men as they spoke in hushed tones and angry gestures. “The dark one, too.”

I sighed. “Yes.” I didn’t think it was the moment to add, at the same time. “We’ve established that I’m a self-absorbed brat, haven’t we? I didn’t know how I felt, let alone how you felt.” I thought about my mother again, and leaned into him dejectedly. “It’s not who I want to be any more.”

“Ssh.” He pulled me in tighter and nestled his face in my hair. “We’ll deal with it later.”

Othrelos joined Kovan in the front of the party, and we started moving again. The caverns seemed to go on forever. The eastern passage Jak had prevented from being used for escape led to a forge, and there alone there were endless twists and turns and hidden ways. And more enemies – some of them Khajiit and Argonian servants, who despite everything that was wrong with Morrowind’s treatment of them and despite having working tools for weapons, fought us to the death. That was depressing. At least it was depressing to me: my pirates were more comfortable, and any discomfort they might have felt was more than compensated in their eyes by the glorious plunder they were finding.

Two levels of forge and a mine in between, and at the end of it all we realized that none of these passages led us where we needed to go. “You could have told us this was a dead end, mate,” said Jak.

“Didn’t ask,” Othrelos answered. “Anyway, I thought you wouldn’t want to leave this big a group of opponents at our back. Or this big a haul.” Even Jak was compelled to grant the point.

We went back the way he had come, only to find that more soldiers had come through the western passages and found their friends dead, which meant that we had another major battle on our hands. This time Melliwin and Othrelos stood together and fired in perfect alternation as if they’d trained together, providing the rest of us with rather good cover as we rushed in with swords and cutlasses raised.

We made impressively quick work of them this time, and as the pirates collected their valuables, I had another moment to talk to Othrelos. “Is this difficult for you? Since you’ve been living here with them?”

“No.” He brushed his fingers affectionately across my forehead, pushing back a lock of hair that had escaped the braids.

“How long have you been here?”

He shrugged. “Month and a half.”

“And you don’t feel anything?”

“I wasn’t here to make friends, Lum. When you do this kind of assignment you don’t let yourself connect to the people around you, in case you have to do something like this to them.” He breathed out loudly. “I don’t like it, which is why I didn’t want to end up in this line of work, but I know how to do it.”

That turned his line of thought, and he frowned. “Lum… did he send you? Did you make some kind of deal with him?”

Of course he was still going to be worried about that. I smiled. “I sent myself, and the deal I have with him is that he is going to leave us both alone if he doesn’t want any more trouble from pirates.”

“Ah.” He grinned. Then he stopped grinning, abruptly. “They seem to be quite fond of you.”

“They should be. Do you know how much I paid for them?”

That didn’t seem to reassure him completely, but it was time to move again. Othrelos advised us to take the higher of the western passages, and this turned out to be because the next cavern was another large one, this time with a deep cleft in its center. On our side there was one isolated building that we sneaked into and out of without much issue, but to reach the other buildings we were going to have to cross a lit bridge. Othrelos tapped Kovan and the two of them strolled across confidently. Othrelos actually called out to the sentries standing at the western edge of the cleft, his voice casual.

And they hailed him in a perfectly friendly manner as he approached them. Because, of course, they knew him.

He led them in polite and meandering conversation as the rest of us crept across the bridge and back into the shadows. No alarms raised, nothing unusual going on, just a fellow soldier taking a new recruit around the grounds, acquainting him with everything. That made it easy to clear one building at a time rather than fighting back a flood of them outside.

Frathen Drothan, as Othrelos had said, was not in his quarters. His journal was, though. At a glance there seemed to be several uses of some huge Dunmeri word I didn’t understand, so for the moment I just tucked it into my shirt to wait until we had cleared the area so I could ask our Dunmeri about it.

The other building belonged to a commander – who seemed to be in the final stages of dying from wounds he’d received from the Morag Tong assassin who lay dead in the corner. As the leader and the one who could feel all the glorious enchantments on the dead assassin’s armor, I claimed that prize for myself.

Othrelos and Melliwin shot down the sentries outside, and that was the top of the cleft handled. “What about the bottom?” I asked.

“They won’t hear us up here,” Othrelos said, “but I think that’s the way down to where Drothan is. Except that no one can get in.” He joined the others in rifling through the commander’s possessions, and seized on something that looked like a large, faintly glowing pearl. “A bezoar,” he said, picking it up. “More valuable in Morrowind – I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in Cyrodiil.”

“Wait, did I see that word?” I muttered, pulling the journal back out of my shirt. “Oh,” I added as I started reading it more carefully, “and what’s this one here?”

I pointed it out to him, and he read it aloud. “Nefarivigum. Honestly, I don’t know.”

“Too bad, because it seems to be what he’s looking for. Damn the king and the houses, Nefarivigum, doom to the Empire, Nefarivigum…” I said the next bit much louder than I meant to. “Mehrunes’ Razor!”

I’d done enough reading as I grew up in a Mages’ Guild hall to know what that was. The soul-stealing weapon created by the same Daedric Lord who had caused the Oblivion Crisis, and more than one major upheaval to more than one kingdom before that. Fabulous.

“Ah, here’s the bezoar. It’s enchanted to open the door at the bottom of the cleft in case of an emergency. There should be two. We need both.”

Othrelos turned and looked around at the others. “I’m sure we picked it up along the way. It’s shiny. Whose bag did it end up in?”

“Mine,” said Jak, with another unpleasant grin.

Great.

Othrelos stepped toward him with a hand out. “Let’s have it, then.”

“And what do I get?”

“We need it for the mission,” Othrelos said calmly, as Zedrick graced his friend with a warning scowl.

“It’s not my mission,” Jak snarled, “and you’re not paying me anything to make it mine, so far. If anything, you’re planning to take something away.” He turned to look at me.

“You hadn’t struck me as the jealous type, Jak,” I said.

“I’m not. It doesn’t mean I want to lose access entirely. But that’s what you want, isn’t it, Dunmer? But maybe for your ‘mission’ you’ll be more willing to negotiate. Do I get one last go at her?”

Othrelos narrowed his eyes and tensed, and Zedrick stepped between the two with an angry look of his own at Jak. I went around both O and Zedrick and smacked Jak hard across the face.

“That’s insubordination, you bastard,” I hissed. “I am not your payment, and I am not going to stand here while you and Othrelos or anyone else discuss me like I’m some form of barter. If you’re done answering to me, give me your share of this take and get out. Or give Othrelos just the bezoar and shut up!”

He gave us the bezoar. We set off for the passage down to the bottom of the cleft. This time Othrelos continued to carry the tension for a while, and he forged ahead shooting furiously when we reached the veterans’ barracks, leaving the others to scramble to catch up with him.

The magic seal opened for him, and we moved into a long, narrow passage. To our right we could see into ruins we could not reach, which meant that we were able to watch one of the Drothmeri be chased down and killed by a pair of – when they had him hurt they ripped into each side of his throat with their teeth. Vampires, true to the rumor.

And “vampires” did not turn out to mean just one or two, or a handful. Numerous vampires, a village of vampires, throughout a cavern larger than any we had yet seen. The structures here were older, made of stone, and most of them were inhabited. Dead Drothmeri littered the ground.

Others were still fighting. I raised my hands to tell the others to hold back, and for a while we watched and waited as the battle went on. No point fighting two enemies at once when patience would leave us only one to deal with.

The vampires won, and then we had to find the way past them ourselves.

I couldn’t say what made us any luckier than the Drothmeri, but somehow, we were. We moved painfully slowly, as quiet as could be, and perhaps that was part of it. When we found one standing alone, Kovan or I crept up behind and slit its throat – except for the one who heard me. She must have been a matriarch, because it took the lot of us to bring her down, and I took a potion to make sure I wouldn’t turn.

When we found several, Othrelos and Melliwin rained arrows, and the rest of us hit them with everything we had. Three potions for Jak and one for Zedrick.

The buildings were all littered with the dead, both Drothmeri and vampires. In the last, as we descended the steps, we could hear someone talking, and we stopped. Only Kovan, Othrelos and I moved forward, being the quietest, all with our weapons drawn.

A male in red robes, and just before he turned to face us, we realized that he was muttering to himself. When he spun around, his face was Dunmer, and crazed, and a fireball was forming in his hand.

These past months Tamriel had been settling for an Arch-Mage who was only rumored to be mad, when apparently one could procure an Arch-Mage who really was. Othrelos shot instantly, and as the arrow pierced Drothan’s throat his spell gargled away into nothing. Kovan and I rushed him and cut him to pieces before he could do anything else.

When he was dead, I turned toward Othrelos. “You’re rather good at that,” I said.

“I didn’t run because I was bad at it. I ran because I didn’t like it.”

Remaining with us were a lowered gate and a standing casket, in which was – it looked like a dremora. We waved for the others to join us: Melliwin brought me a journal she had found in a room nearby. I was the one they relied on for reading.

It was Drothan’s diary of his progress here. “Apparently this is the Nefarivigum he was talking about,” I said, then read for a minute. “That’s the Razor behind the gate. And the dremora is some kind of guardian, and – oh.” I slammed the journal shut.

“What?” said Othrelos.

“His theory was that to open the gate, someone would have to take out the dremora’s heart and eat it.”

There was a moment of silence. Without thinking, we all turned to face Melliwin, our only Bosmer. She shook her head, scowling with disgust. “No! I’m not the one who killed it, and it’s not even fresh.”

Silence again. Then Zedrick growled. “Fuck this. Lads!” He strode toward the gate, and his crew followed him, leaving me and Othrelos watching them. They grabbed onto the bottom of the gate and, on Zedrick’s count, heaved upward. Groans and strained looks, as if the gate was very heavy, and awful creaking noises.

They’d managed to raise it a foot or so when the dremora began to move. I shouted a warning as I drew my sword, and Othrelos shot the thing in the chest, but it was not fatal. The pirates let go of the gate, and it dropped with a loud thud. I attacked, landing one good cut to its stomach but taking one to my chest in exchange. But that meant that the dremora’s focus was on me, and it didn’t see Zedrick coming.

The daedric warrior fell in front of me, and as I fell to my knees I could hear the gate creaking open, and feel someone take hold of me from behind. Helped me gently back into a lean against his chest, pressed a bottle into my hand with his dark one. Othrelos. He helped me raise it to my mouth, and then wrapped his arms around my waist and nestled against me as the potion took effect and my wound closed.

When I could stand, which was when Othrelos helped me to my feet, everyone was just standing there, waiting for me. They hadn’t touched the Razor. Nobody said why – perhaps because they were waiting for me to do it, or because it was a thing of Dagon and too frightening to touch. The most hateful of all the Daedric Lords had forged it as a thing of destruction, a sort of weapon far more horrible than I would ever use… but oh, I thought, what a useful deterrent it would be against Fathis and his kind. No one would dare to come against us again.

So I went in and I took it, felt the hum of its bloodlust in my hand. The Razor was mine.