Snippet #2211228

Adrienne at last realized Sinderion's presence beside her, and nodded her thanks to him, stepping away. Unfortunately, she wound up much less stable on her feet than she thought, and one of her legs gave out, sending her down on one knee. As the conversation between Stonehammer and Lynly continued, Adrienne focused on her breathing, using the hand that wasn't clutching her side to fumble around in her belt-pouches. Between the health and magicka potions they'd used up in the last couple of days, she was down to nothing but a stamina draught, but she carried several independently-edible ingredients on her, and she reached for a few leaves, laying one on her tongue and chewing deliberately. The effect was instantaneous, but rather small: her pain subsided to a dull roar, and she could feel a few of her tensed muscles relaxing.

The next was to slow her bleeding, but until she could get access to some bandages, it would still be problematic. She considered tearing strips off her robes and using those, but still more was happening, and she needed to pay attention. Rising to her feet, Adrienne glanced back and forth between the unfamiliar woman and Stonehammer. "You... you know the Shade?" she asked, voice still faint from the shallowness of her breath. Half-addled or not, there was no mistaking the importance of that particular revelation.

The faint sound of Adrienne's voice had turned Drayk's attention away from the conversation, at which point he finally took in her wounded state, and immediately became fraught with alarm. "Adrienne!" he blurted to himself, quickly moving closer to her. He took a moment to take in the extent of her injuries, grimacing as though struck himself when he surveyed the gashes in her abdomen. Wobbling back and forth on his feet, he rubbed his hands together rapidly. "Alright, okay, okay, I can fix this. Damn dragon, of all things. Just hold still."

It took a moment to call healing magic back into his hands, snuffing the flames that had yearned to ignite at his fingertips, but he did so in the end, his palms lighting up with yellow-white light. His right hand he let fall on her shoulder, to steady her in the event she felt the need to fall over or something. His left he gently placed across her midsection, allowing curative magic to flow into her. His magic was cut short quickly, however, when he realized his previous exertions had completely drained him of magicka.

"By the... damn it, anyone got a magicka potion?" Drayk glanced around the group. The one who responded to him was the one he didn't expect to: the woman garbed in feathered robes. "Hey, Fireball. Here. My own brew." She handed him a vial of swirling blue liquid, which he gratefully accepted, popping the small cork and downing it. He shook his head at the taste, but then got straight back to work, his magicka restored enough to continue. "This'll just take a moment..."

The woman, Maya, as Stonehammer had referred to her, sighed lightly before stooping to pick up the vial, which Drayk had dropped after finishing. "To answer your question, doll, I've known the Shade for a while. You could say we're... acquaintances. Friends, even. Though I doubt he would say he has any friends. He's not the type. Even so, he came to visit me at my little coven, and convinced me to drag myself all the way out here to the Reach. Said it would be worth my while. Can't say I'm disappointed so far, apart from the dragon getting away. Seems like the pieces are moving in earnest now, doesn't it Vodrin?"

The Stormcloak half-grunted, half-chuckled. "This Imperial convoy's proof of that. The Spymaster must have located me. It seems she prefers to keep her enemies close. Amusing how all her plans fall apart when she makes the slightest miscalculation."

When the immediate problem of potentially-fatal wounds to an ally had resolved itself with Drayk's intervention, Sinderion allowed himself to relax a bit, glancing down at the shattered weapon in his hands and immediately regretting, as he always did, his temper. It seemed that, even with years of strict self-control, he was not as immune as he had previously believed to mind-numbing rage, and the past couple of days had taught him that lesson with all the harshness of a whip laid across bare shoulders. What he did not understand was that the lesson was far from over.

It is in the nature of analytical minds to analyze, and this is no great surprise. So perhaps Sinder should not have been quite so shocked as he was when he felt, contrary to his expectations, another hot flare of rage. The source, once he gave it a moment's thought, was obvious: the latecoming woman was a witch. The early reference to Hircine he'd caught but chosen to ignore. Daedra worship was not as uncommon as some people liked to believe it was, and though he had a special bitterness towards the Lord of the Hunt, he was not so presumptuous as to believe a god would take any interest in him, and so any anger or assumption of guilt on the part of anyone but the ones who'd changed him was... foolish.

The reference to a 'coven' and the manner in which the woman was dressed were harder to ignore. She smelled like the forest and blood and magic, and that particular combination was not one he regularly encountered. The realization clicked into place, and no sooner had it than his steel sword rang free of his sheath, the now-usless bow discarded to the side. "Witch," he growled, and the extent to which the word was in any comprehensible language was unknown to him. He wasn't speaking from his rational mind, at any rate. The Altmer's pupils dilated, nearly obscuring the blue of his irises, and the nails on his hands hardened, extending by a half-inch or so. It was the sickening feeling of his teeth rearranging in his mouth that he actually noticed, however, and though his instinct demanded that he pounce immediately, the knowledge of what was happening to him was enough to stay the actual motion, for now. Chances were, someone was going to have to intervene.

Vanryth took in everything with his usual silence. He merely watched as the Nord woman talked down the Stonehammer, as the Imperials quickly left them, and as the new arrival made her own way to the group discussion. By the woman's own admission, she had connections with the Shade, and perhaps even the Mentor. The woman had knowledge, of which had been recently scant. Though, he couldn't help but think that this was all too convienent. Though he would never admit it, even if he were able, he would take all of the information with a grain of a salt. A bit of suspicion is healthy, while too much is being paranoid. Truth be told, Vanryth would rather be paranoid than be surprised.

Though the woman was a witch. That made things... Difficult. For Sinder at least. Vanryth turned his one good eye towards the Altmer and watched his body language carefully. The growled monosyallabic word and the ring of naked steel told Van that he would have to take Sinder's mind away from the witch and somewhere else. Perhaps appeal to reason. If something was not done, then the blood that the Nord avoided would be spilled elsewhere. He sheathed his own refurbished blade in his naked sheath and stepped forward in front of Sinder, obscuring his view of the witch and leveling a hard eye on the man. No, now is not the time for the beast Vanryth mentally entreated.

The woman had information they desparately needed, and it would be hard to retrieve such information from a corpse. But how was he to tell that to Sinder without a tongue? Once again, his disability got in the way of expressing himself, and he felt a pang of frustration, though he bottled it up. Cooler head must prevail after all. Instead, Vanryth raised a calloused finger and pointed towards Sinder's eyes and then pointed to his own one good eye. He repeated the process twice more, telling Sinder to focus on him and not the witch. Sinder needed to understand that this woman was important. He only hoped that the intelligent man inside would realize that and quell the beast begging to get out.

They needed the woman. Alive.

Adrienne might have been able to contibute to the discussion if she were not preoccupied with getting her flesh knit back together. She leaned heavily into the hand on her shoulder, breathing steadily through her nose to control the speed of it. The wounds in her side were stubborn, but she did what she could to help the process, warming one hand with a very small amount of fire magic and melting the ice there away so that the flesh could move and re-adhere to itself, leaving only three jagged, pale scars on her abdomen to show for the trouble. The burns were bit trickier, and she was of no assistance there, so she simply relaxed and tried not to impede his progress. The words being exchanged registered, though somewhat dimly, at least until she heard Sinder.

At least, it sounded a bit like him, only... worse. She'd never seen him transform, a testament to the fact that he had much greater self-control than most of the people she'd ever meet. Now, though, that word was so nearly snarled that it frightened her somewhat, more for his sake than her own. She had no idea if whatever he became coud differentiate between friend and foe, and she had no desire to find out either way. As soon as Drayk had managed to soothe away the pain and blistering from her burn wounds, she placed her forehead against his shoulder and murmured a soft thank you registering that he, like she suspected of most of them, smelled of ash. Gathering her fortitude to herself, she pushed herself back upright and faced the situation at hand.

Van appeared to be trying to calm the obviously-angry Sinder, and one look at the other three people in the circle identified why. There was nothing to stir his anger with Lynly or Stonehammer, but the other woman looked very much like Adrienne had always imagined a Glenmoril witch might, a fact that had not really made itself apparent to her before. This was... bad, and that was probably an understatement. It was probably better for all of them if Van distracted Sinder and she prevented the witch from speaking to him, lest she inadvertantly (or perhaps advertantly, who could say?) goaded him into something far worse.

"What miscalculation was that?" Adrienne asked, too tired to be all that surprised that a seemingly-fortuitous entrance had apparently been anything but. When had she stopped believing in coincidence? It had been years, at least.

Maya had raised her eyebrows, then taken a single step back, upon being spoken to by the Altmer. She crossed her arms, appearing slightly offended. Or possibly annoyed. It was difficult to tell. "If I'm not mistaken," she began, "the potion I freely gave to you is the only reason your friend here has stopped bleeding all over the place. If I've somehow wronged you personally in the past, I apologize, but I do not remember any such occasion. I feel like I'd remember a face like yours. Very handsome, if I may say."

Shaking her head slightly, she switched to the previous line of thought. "Anyway, I'd ask that you please try to contain your hate for the moment. We've more important things to attend to." Stonehammer seemed to agree, as his hand had drifted to the pommel of his hammer upon Sinder's small outburst, an indication of the side he would take if things came to violence once more. Hoping to avoid that as well, he joined in Adrienne's tactic, shifting the conversation away from witches and werewolves, and back to the matter at hand.

"Her miscalculation was the dragon. Without it, I'd never have gotten free of that cage. I'd never have convinced you lot to kill them all and free me. I couldn't even get you to kill one. Seems the old man might have actually changed after all." The few remaining Stormcloaks had awkwardly gotten closer, unused to seeing their commander speaking with such a group of strangers. He waved them off. "Stop standing around. Search for survivors. We'll be moving out shortly."

The witch's words were not what the Altmer needed to hear, though there was certainly some truth to them, one which his more rational self was quick to latch onto and attempt to batter his groundless hate with. It wasn't the case that every Glenmoril witch was responsible for what happened to him. Indeed, the ones who directly were had... died quite some time ago.

A heat built beneath his skin, and Sinder was uncomfortable in his own body, as though it was too small to contain everything that he was any longer. It was profoundly uncomfortable, and precluded him from remaining still in body or mind. There was something metallic and rotten in his mouth, thick over his tongue and choking in its consistency. He retched, spilling something dark and liquid and glistening onto the dirt floor of... somewhere. He neither knew nor cared where he was; the pain was too great for that. It reverberated, splitting through his skull like arcs of magical lightning, and trilled into his limbs with all the force of a tidal wave. It was impossible to stop, and once he realized that, he stopped trying.

Something snapped, and then shifted, and it felt like he was being torn apart. It was suddenly obvious what he had to do, and unthinking, the beast lunged for the nearest pale neck, heedless of the magic that scorched his tawny fur.

'Died' was perhaps a gentle word for it.

To his shame, some part of him still exulted in that, and he wondered, somewhere in that primal part of himself that he hated, if she would taste as they had, flayed to bits and lifeless. The thought panicked him, and when he caught motion out of his peripheral vision, he focused on it immediately, seeking any form of distraction that could be provided. Even as close to that dangerous internal precipice as he was, he recognized his friend's face, and the grim expression on it brought something of himself back to him. The meaning of Vanryth's gesture was obvious, made so with time spent acquainted, and Sinderion nodded his assent, shutting out the conversation and slowing his breathing, trying to force his heart rate to slow. The less adrenaline in his system, the better.

It worked, for the most part, and he blinked slowly several times, letting a little more of the rage dissipate each time he faced the world anew. He could not bring himself to look at the witch, so he focused instead on his companions as they spoke, and on Stonehammer. That was simpler, safer, better for all of them.

At this point, Drayk rejoined the conversation, having done all he could for Adrienne. The wounds would certainly be sore for a good time to come, but the damage was mostly healed, and the burns from the dragon had been removed almost entirely. "So can you help us at all? Either of you?" Maya merely shrugged. "I don't actually know why I'm here, either, beyond being told to by a very dangerous and very dashing man. How about it, Vodrin? Got a direction for me?" The Nord rolled his eyes.

"I was given a task, and I will fulfill it. We received a visit from the Shade in the night, when the convoy had stopped for the evening. None of the Imperials saw him, nor did I until his face was just beyond the bars. I didn't actually see the old man, but the Shade said he was with him. They knew of a simple task the Spymaster had given me some time ago, a simple message delivery. He wanted to know who it was for. Saw no reason not to tell him. They were sealed orders of some sort, to be delivered to an Orcish stronghold in the Rift."

At that, Maya raised her eyebrows. "You delivered orders to the Bloody Curse? What did they say?" but Stonehammer simply shook his head. "Wasn't my place to ask. I just delivered the orders and left. That was all the Shade wanted to know. He told me the old man's new pupils would be coming along after him, and that I should send them in the same direction. He wants to be followed, though I couldn't say why." Maya appeared thoughtful for a moment. "If you're going to be searching for that Orc, then I'm coming along. Unless any of you are from the Rift, then I know the area the best. I can help you find her."

"As am I." Lynly stated evenly. A bold statement, considering just a few moments beforehand, the Stormcloaks and herself were enemies. To interject herself into the conversation seemed bullheaded or, optimistically, brave. At first, it felt as if that was all she was going to say until she continued. "I know the Rift as well. My travels have taken me all over Skyrim, and now that my mission with the Legion has ended," she said, even though the mission ended as a failure. She was tasked to aid the Captain in capturing the Stormcloaks. Now that the same Stormcloaks were milling about around them freely, it was no stretch of the imagination that the task could be construed as a failure. "I am free to do what I wish. I know nothing about the Shade and this old man you speak of, yet I can smell adventure on your heads. That scent alone is enough for me," She said, finishing her speech.

Though, despite what her bold words said about her as a person, her body language was an entirely different matter. Her shoulders were drawn close around her, her hands clutched at her elbows and she was situated a bit further from the group than was considered normal. She may have held the words of a warrior on her tongue, but she had the appearence of a rabbit ready to run. A stark contrast from the surehanded warrior who fought the dragon with no reservations only minutes ago.

The places this conversation had taken them were not really at all what Adrienne had expected. Perhaps, where these people were involved, it was best to give up any notion of expectation at all. They apparently had two volunteers and a jumble of new information, only some of which made sense. She supposed that the 'Bloody Curse' must be a group of orcs, or maybe just a singluar orc, it was hard to say. Either way, they were located in the Rift, which was apparently their next destination, and the Shade was both aware of their continued progress and apparently desirous of it. The reference to the Mentor changing somehow didn't surprise her much, as something to that effect had been hinted at before. She still didn't understand what it meant. Had he once been like them? Nearly irredeemable and lost? Was this as much a trial for him as they were finding it to be for themselves? The idea of the Mentor struggling with anything was foreign to her, and uncomfortable somehow, but she supposed it was not impossible.

Either way, she felt herself in no position to legislate about whether or not they were taking volunteers. There was something about this task that was immensely private, but on the other hand, it seemed that the world wasn't going to cooperate with her desires there, and she wasn't sure they could refuse help where it was freely offered. She looked to her friends- no, her family- for once allowing her feelings to freely show on her face: she was apprehensive, she was exhausted, but she was also hopeful, and a tiny bit optimistic.

Vanryth breathed a sigh of relief as Sinder managed to regain control of all of his facilities. He finally stepped out from in front of Sinder, but maneuvered himself between him and the witch, hopefully blocking his view. The pieces of conversation he heard only managed to confuse him, and for him their next goal was all but fuzzy. He hoped that Adrienne, feeling that she was more intelligent than he was, would be able to decipher all of the information they had gathered and digest it for him. But from what he gathered, apparently, two others had volunteered to guide their little group. The Nordic woman, and the witch. The Nord, he was fine with. She proved herself capable. The Witch on the other hand... Would be probablematic. He quickly glanced at Sinder and sighed again.

He felt weary, yet again. It seemed like a recent occurance, him being reminded of his age and hard fought life. That morning, he had woken up to stiff bones and sluggish muscles. He felt the same would be true for the following days. Especially with the witch around... He sincerely hoped that the mentor had a good reason for putting them through this, if not, Van had a couple of choice words for him... If only he had the tongue to speak them.

Upon hearing the apparent verdicts of their newfound... allies was far too strong a sentiment, but he could think of no other appropriate word, Sinder swallowed thickly. He could still swear that the taste of blood and flesh lingered at the back of his throat, but that was probably just an unwanted sense-memory. He wasn't in a position to trust any of them, but there was nothing terribly objectionable about the warrior-woman's presence, and if it was beneficial to the others, he would willingly concede to it. The witch- Maya, someone had said, and he'd need to use it if he wanted to avoid dehumanizing her too much- was another matter. How long would a rational consideration like her relative innocence in his case keep the rage at bay? Given the pressure the beast had been exerting on him recently, he did not know. It was not his desire to kill her, and the best way for her to preserve her life would be to stay well clear of him.

But, a voice reminded him internally, she should not have to. Nobody deserves punishment for being what they are. The obvious 'except me' did not even need to be thought, and Sinderion set his jaw resolutely. "...Do as you will," he managed, and at least his voice was back to its normal mid-range tenor, though not without an abnormal raspy edge to it. He'd make it a point to explain exactly the danger he presented at some later point, but for now, he was eager to be away from this place- he was growing to hate it already.

"Excellent," Maya said, perhaps more cheerily than was necessary. "As Stonehammer mentioned, my name is Maya, though some have called me Blackfeather. Now, if there's nothing else to be done here, shall we be off?" It seemed that her reasons for wanting to accompany the group to find this Bloody Curse would be remaining with her. Stonehammer nodded. "My men and I should be moving along as well. I'm going to Markarth, to pay that Dunmer woman a visit. Good hunting, Maya."

"An excellent choice of words," she said, seeming pleased. With that, she led the way east, expecting the Sellswords and Lynly to keep pace. They had a trail to follow once more.