Eye of the Wind – Ch. 2 – 8: Hunting the Phial

• Posted by Kyrielle Atrinati September 12, 2012 - 361 views

  I turned to find Derkeethus kneeling before the stone wall, clutching his ears, rocking, and muttering unintelligibly.  On either side of him, the stone faces gaped, leaning forward as if to swallow him.

  "Derk?"  Placing a hand on his shoulder, I knelt beside my friend and shook him gently.  "Derk, can you hear me?"  Worried, I shook harder and continued to call his name.

  After a moment, he began to shake all over, chanting quietly in a language I didn't understand.  To my horror he threw back his head and let out an unearthly wail that began beyond my hearing and descended, snakelike, into a guttural rumble.  The Argonian's claws dug into the sides of his head and his eyes glowed a glacial blue.  At the bottom of the sound, Derkeethus fell to the stone floor, panting and shivering.  

  I touched his head and found it was blazing.  Not sure what precisely to do in this circumstance, I emptied part of my waterskin into a strip of cloth and squeezed it over his forehead.  When that didn't do anything, I simply upended the entire waterskin over his head, wondering if this symbolic dousing of a fire would work in a medical sense.  

  Gradually, haltingly, the shivering ceased and he breathed more evenly.

  "We are never going near one of these things again," he rasped at last.

  "What happened?  Are you all right?" I looked at his eyes and saw they were their usual immutable green, if a little clouded and lost.

  "I heard--I saw--everything."

  "What do you mean 'everything'?"

  "Everything.  Everything the people in this place ever knew or saw or did or felt.  They killed people for fun, Gwaihen.  Not for profit or war or any cause at all.  Just for fun."  I stared at Derk for a long time, trying to understand what he meant or what he saw.  At length, I found I could not.  I wasn't sure I ever would.  The only thing I understood at that moment was that the sight of Derkeethus keening would haunt me for many nights.

  Turning, I spotted a low hallway underneath the Wall.  It was pale and misty.  There was something that looked like an unlit brazier at the end.

  "Come on," I said, pulling him to his feet, "We still need to find the Phial."

  The brazier wasn't really a brazier at all but a basin craved into a pillar of stone.  I thought of offering plates at the cathedrals in Cyrodiil as I examined the runes crawling along the insides of the depression in the rock.  Nurelion had mentioned something like this would be here, and remembering what came next, I carefully poured the mixture he had given me into the basin.  

  Phosphorescent plumes frothed from the mixture in noxious fumes that filled the cramped chamber.  Derk and I coughed fitfully, shielding our noses with our hands, but finding it did nothing to help.  Slowly, the room reeled and wheeled around us in an increasingly steep series of banks and turns, until, when we thought we would faint, a hidden door in the rock ground open.

  The next room was a little larger, the ceiling a little higher, and the air a little clearer.  Stone vents cut into the rock let in chilly air from a distant mountainside.  And there, sitting on a pedestal directly in front of us, looking small and ineffectual--fragile and unsuspecting--was the Phial.

  "At last," Derkeethus whispered, taking slow, dreamlike steps into the room.  I hesitated to follow as the sensation of walking into the last squeeze of the trap washed over me.  But I couldn't let Derk go ahead alone.  We advanced carefully, wondering if the goal of all our pains was real.

  "Stop right there!"

  Derkeethus leapt out of his skin as he turned around, momentarily looking like a child caught with its hand in the jerky jar.  I recognized the voice as the one I heard earlier, and yet, a deeper recognition rang through my head.  The sensation was not a pleasant one.

  "On behalf of the Empire, I thank you for making this journey easier than we could have ever hoped," spoke an Imperial officer, striding into the chamber with his support in tow.  "But your part is over, and if you're smart, you will cooperate."

  I felt my blood begin to boil as I remembered this man's voice more clearly.  This was the officer who threw my father's body out into the snow.  Who led us through those icy passages with little more than bread.  I was certain.  Without being aware of it, I drew my knives and started to rush at the man, screaming his name as I remembered it.  "CONSTANTIUS!"

  And it was not only my voice that shouted it, but the voice of the chaotic many inside my mind.  In that moment, we were united into a multi-faceted, yet singular, desire.

  Legate Constantius cooly grabbed my knives with his gloved hands, heedless of the blades, and twisted cruelly.  I was thrown off-balance and soon kicked to the floor.  My previously twisted and broken ankle blossomed in pain as I landed on it, sprawling awkwardly on the ground.  Derkeethus had already drawn his pickaxes and was rushing towards the Legate.

  "Restrain them," he ordered.  Three soldiers pushed past him, drawing their swords.  One held the tip of the blade at my throat, effectively pinning me to the floor.  The other two seized Derkeethus by the arms and stamped on the back of his knees, forcing him into a kneeling position.

  Slowly, the Legate kneeled in front of my crumpled form and took my chin roughly in his hand.  He turned my face this way and that, appraising it as one might appraise cattle.  Then, he smiled devilishly.  "Yes, I remember you, you little upstart.  We almost had you that night.  You and your sorry kind would have been executed were it not for that old man.  I bet you staged that didn't you, elf," he said disdainfully.

  "Let her go!" Derkeethus shouted angrily, though to me it sounded far away.  My attack thwarted, I felt the room reeling violently as the cacophony of voices, which had begun with a low grumble after the assault, rose into a discontented roar for destruction.

  With a shove, he let go of my chin and got to his feet.  "Just think of how good it will look on my report when I can not only claim the White Phial for the War Effort, but put to rest some unfinished business with an escaped convict and her accomplice."  In stating this, he sauntered over towards the Phial, and grinning, took it from its pedestal.

  "You can't have it!  We need it!" struggled Derk, fighting against his captives.  Legate Constantius only waggled the bottle tauntingly at my friend.

  "Not anymore, you don't."

  Maddeningly, my eyes rolled in my head and together, somehow, Derkeethus and I screamed some incomprehensible negative at the same time.  As the sound escaped, I felt a raw, burning power like the dragon heart rising in my throat, but when the word escaped, it was, for me, only a cry of fury.  For Derkeethus, it became something other.  A wave of undulating heat rippled through the air from the Argonian's mouth and insinuated itself around the Phial.

  The Phial, which had sat quiescent in the officer's hand, suddenly glowed with a white, hot light.  The officer, surprised and burned by the heat, dropped the glass.  It fell to the ground with a sickening crack.

  "You'll pay for that!" the Legate shouted, drawing his sword.  Striking as fast as a sabre cat, the flat of the sword met the side of Derk's head with a loud whack.  He looked as if he might behead my friend, and part of me felt fear for his life, while another part felt an unbridled joy at the thought of his head rolling across the floor.  Distantly, I vomited, feeling out of control.

  The sound of my retching brought the Legate back to his senses.  "Bind them and confiscate their weapons.  They're worth more alive than dead."  He picked up the cracked Phial, already cooling, and pocketed it.

  We were roughly stripped of our weaponry.  I strangled out a cry as my bow was taken from me.  I felt naked without it.  With the chaos in my head, I also felt alone in a vast sea of moving monstrosities.

  "I'm sorry, Henny," Derkeethus mumbled.  "This is my fault."

  "How--?" But before I could finish we were shoved into single file.

  Taking strips of leather from our packs, the Imperials fashioned a line that kept our hands at our sides on short leashes.  The remaining section of the line was held by the soldier in front of us.  

  Thus we were yoked like cattle and led as such.  The soldiers were not gentle in leading us out of the cave.  They yanked and jerked the line cruelly when we stepped behind.  Several times I tripped on my swollen ankle, and once I fell to the ground only to be yanked back up again by my hair.

  I whipped my head around and sank my teeth into his wrist, biting hard enough to draw blood.  Quietly reveling in the smell and taste.  He backhanded me to the floor, almost knocking me unconscious.

  "We need them awake enough to walk, Fulbar," the Legate commented cooly.

  After what felt like an eternity, we were pulled, pushed, and outright shoved out of the cave and into the blinding afternoon sunlight.

  "We march straight to Windhelm.  No breaks.  No rests.  No stopping.  I want one man in front, one man behind.  There will be no escaping this time," he said, sneering at us.