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"Nothing that we know of." There was a moment of silence between us all. "Some of the others went to Pell’s Gate for safety but with the sudden lack of travellers arriving here were are starved of information. There are fewer people on the roads of late with daedra raiding the lands but now there are almost none at all. Everyone in every villages nearby could be dead as far as we know. Or, they could be perfectly fine and not having the slightest clue about what’s happening here."
"And the Legion Forts?"
"Same problem. The two nearest are Fort Homestead to the northwest and Fort Alessia to the northeast. I don’t know if they have been suffering attacks but we know that the Legionaries at Fort Homestead have suspicions at least."
"How is that?" Viconia asked this time, moving closer to the map and tracing over roads and landmarks with a finger.
"Yesterday morning one of them arrived here. He hasn’t said much and as best I can tell he’s in shock. Said something about his squad vanishing at the northern messenger post but hasn’t said much else since."
"A Legionary?" my interest piqued and I looked at Ylfgar. "Where is he?"
He nodded to the door set in the opposite wall to the way we came in. like the front doors it was massive and reinforced with strips and bands of metal. A thick oaken plank was set against the doorframe where it could be used to further barricade it closed and I could see from the hinges that it was designed to open outwards only. "He’s on the balcony. I put him out there to stop scaring the others."
"Is he deranged or something?"
Ylfgar shook his head. "No, but he’s not doing well around people at the moment. Poor bastard was terrified and ran into town before collapsing from exhaustion. If I was to guess I would say that he ran the entire way from the messenger post to us, in full armour too. Since he woke up he’s done nothing more than just sit there, staring into nothing and sharpening his sword."
I gave Viconia a glance and she nodded to me before motioning to Ylfgar to start showing more locations on the map. Carefully I walked over to the door, feeling the heavy latch and pushing the door open into the sunlight while Viconia and Ylfgar continued the discussion. The balcony barely even qualified for the term, barely being more than three metres long and a metre and a half wide and only just having enough space for the door to open. Almost devoid of ornamentation there was, little in the way of furniture other than a tiny table and chair allowing someone to sit and look over the town in the direction of the castle.
The lone Legionary was there, and I saw the look of someone who had gone through the worst the world could throw at them and being left scarred and injured as a result. There was not a mark on what little flesh I could see outside of the heavy chainmail, leather and plate armour that he wore but the look in his white filled eyes was one of someone suffering some terrible malady of the mind.
He didn’t even look up as I exited the building, his eyes downcast and staring almost without blinking at the wooden boards under his feet. Whetstone in hand he dragged it down the length of his gladius away from him, filling the air with a steady sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk...
"Legionary?" I said simply, looking over at the way he sat hunched in the chair and lost in the depths on his own mind.
There was no answer and I closed the door softly behind me, watching as he continued to scrape the whetstone down his sword. The gleaming silver edge showed me an edge fine enough to lop off an arm with no difficulty, possibly even through boiled leather armour.
Kneeling down in front of him I looked into his white filled eyes, seeing the same look of horror that I had seen on members of the 14th after battles against corpus creatures. It was the same look that I too had worn many years ago after a night of blood and carnage in Vvardenfell snow.
"My name is Kaius Desin, Archer-Prefect of the 8th Casta, 14th Legion."
At my name and old rank there was a twitch in his expression and the white eyes moved up and met my own. For a moment the whetstone stopped in place and I found myself noticing just how young this soldier of the Empire really was. Little more than a raw recruit, he would have been lucky if he had even seen his eighteenth birthday.
"Sir." He said softly, almost as though hesitant to use his voice or make any sound other than the sharpening of his sword. There was a pause as he looked over my unusual armour and cloak, the far-seeing eyes focusing on the signet ring on my left hand before returning to his blade. "You don’t look like a Legionary."
"I used to be. I’m a Knight now." My voice was just as quiet as his as the whetstone returned to the blade.
Sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk...
"What’s your name?" I asked carefully. For a several moments I thought that he had withdrawn into his own mind again, a sanity frayed and shredded and leaving only the Legion’s training and discipline behind.
"Sir. Hastatii Hadrgar Ingrarsson. 3rd Casta, 1st Legion."
An accent thick from the frozen northern holds of Skyrim, his rank revealed him to be nothing more than a fresh recruit in his second year of service. Less than twelve months ago he would have found himself parading the drill squares and feeling the lash of the Centurion’s drill canes as he was transformed from a teenager into a Legionary. He was barely old enough to shave, and still had most of his Legion service ahead of him. Now instead he had found himself in a nightmare that his conscious mind was trying desperately to remove itself from.
"What happened Hadrgar? Where’s the rest of your squad?"
Sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk... sscchhiicckk...
"They’re gone."
There was the tiniest of nods but there was no hesitation in the whetstone along the blade. Every dozen or so motions he would turn the blade over, working on the other side and ensuring that there was no rounding of the edge. From the look of the leaf shaped gladius it possibly had an edge superior to Sunchild’s after hours of constant whetting.
There was a moment of hesitation, a tremble that started deep in his chest and reverberated through his arm until the sword shook. The eyes clenched tight, knuckling whitening and he choked in a breath.
"Gone. Th-they’re all gone." The sob that he had been struggling to contain finally broke through and the sword began shaking violently. "Ysmir forgive me... I... I abandoned them..."
The sword dropped to the floor with a clatter, followed shortly by the well-used whetstone and he pressed his gloved hands into his face. Tears streamed from between his fingers and trailed down the outer layers of his plated gauntlets as he shuddered and began crying. With little idea what to do or how to properly react I leaned forward, putting my arms around the young soldier and pulling him tight as he babbled and bawled from all the pent up fear and emotions of the previous days.
Tears soaked the outer layer of my armour, rolling down my breastplate and I couldn’t help but think of all the other Legionaries in my time that had succumbed to the horrors of the profession. Those outside of the Legion saw only the faceless guardians, the invincible armoured warriors that crushed all in their path and kept the Empire safe, but for those within we all knew the feelings and emotions that coursed through our breasts and gnawed at our minds. From facing down the afflicted corpus mutants of Red Mountain, the savage blood lusting Orc berserkers, the insidious hit-and-run attacks of the Valenwood insurgents and countless other threats; every Legionary faced a daily struggle. Many would wear the scars on their flesh like a badge of honour but for those who had never felt the kiss of a blade or injury still had to content with tattered and frayed sanities that would leave them awake and sweating in the depths of the night.
For this young Legionary, so far from his home in Skyrim and the only survivor of his squad, there had been nothing left but to fall into the practices and drills engraved into him from months of training. An empty shell had been left behind until my presence had forced his mind to accept what had happened to him.
For several minutes I could do nothing but kneel there holding him and wait until the wracking waves of anguish began to subside and he was left utterly spent. Suddenly and exceedingly embarrassed he pulled away, knuckling his eyes with his gloved fingers and looking into the sky as he breathed out heavily.
"Sorry sir." He said, trying and failing to gain some measure of control over his breathing.
I patted him on the shoulder, feeling the thick metal plates of his pauldron under my palm. "Don’t be. You’re not the first Legionary to have cried and you definitely won’t be the last."
The mucus filled snort from the young man was bitter, but there was a hint of a smile on his face as he hawked and spat over the railing. I rose to my feet and felt the twinge in my knees from kneeling in my armour. "Are you able to tell me what happened?"
He fell silent again, staring at the ground while trying to wipe away the moisture from his eyes and nose. It was to be one battle he wouldn’t win for some time yet but after some hesitation he reached down and dragged his sword from where it had fallen.
"Tribune Gro-Bogakul had been hearing reports of people being attacked or disappearing on the roads so he sent a few squads out to do some patrols. My squad had been sent to check in with the messenger posts between Pell’s Gate and Glenvar and see if they had heard anything."
Moving over to the opposite side of the tiny balcony I sat down and stretched my legs out. "And had they?"
Hadrgar shrugged. "The first couple hadn’t, at least not what I heard. Dulmerea... I mean Prefect Melsran; she had been the only one who spoke to any of the post guards." The whetstone found its way into his hands again but after a moment or two he thought better of it, putting it into his pack on the table. "We spent the day marching between the posts and heading south but it was only when we got to the last post that anything seemed wrong."
"Was everyone dead?" I guessed.
There was a shake of the head and he scratched at the short bristles of hair on his scalp. Like most Legionaries south of the Imperial city they purposely shaved their heads to reduce the chances of parasites and scalp-rot from wearing a helmet and padding in the humidity. "No. but there was no one there. Not a single person, horse or animal. Other than a few knocked over chairs and some broken pottery it was like they had all simply got up and left."
"So what did you all do?"
He gestured emptily. "The Prefect ordered us to lock the building down and wait. It was late afternoon by that stage and so we settled in for the night, waiting to see if anyone would come along but otherwise preparing to head into town in the morning to find out more. It was the usual routine; we set up sentries, had dinner and retired for the night."
Breathing heavily, he looked up into the sky again, jaw clenching and unclenching as he tried to force his mouth and throat to release their hold on his words. Moisture returned to his eyes for a moment until he crushed it aside. "It would have been around midnight when I got up. I wasn’t sentry for another couple of hours but I needed to take a shit. I went to the outhouse, did my thing and just as I was finishing I heard a scuffle and someone cry out. I thought that Sidrch had rolled over in his sleep onto someone again like he usually did but then someone started screaming."
I watched as he closed his eyes and balled his fists up tight in their plate gauntlets. It was obvious that he hadn’t taken his armour off since that night, and like most Legionaries on patrol they would alternate nights sleeping fully equipped. Half of his squad would have been in armour when they were attacked.
"By the time I finished putting my pants and greaves back on it was all over. Everyone was gone. Everyone else but me had been taken and all that was left was whatever gear they weren’t carrying."
For a moment I looked over the trembling teenager, feeling the vampire coming to the surface slightly and using my enhanced senses to look and listen to him. Leaving someone behind or missing someone didn’t sound like something werewolves would do, let alone be capable of and I knew that they would have senses just as good as mine, if not better. On the surface there appeared to be nothing untoward about the young soldier that would set him apart from the thousands of others serving the Empire, but looking over him and listening to his heart I soon learned of a possible reason why he was missed. Hidden in the outhouse his scent would have been effectively masked, and listening carefully I could hear the steady, but slightly irregular beat of his heart. A birth defect, something minor and not too life threatening had meant that to creatures hunting with their noses and ears he had been slightly camouflaged in the night. If death in battle didn’t claim him then his heart might as he got older; but that night the irregular bump... bump...a-bump had left him a survivor.
"What did you do then?"
The laugh was hollow and I could see him struggling not to cry again. "I didn’t do anything. I simply sat in the outhouse and counted the minutes until morning came. When dawn broke I grabbed all my gear and ran here as fast as I could."
We both sat in silence for a few minutes as he looked down at his hands and shook with the force of the emotions churning in his belly and mind. "I’ve failed... I failed my friends. I failed the Legion. And I’ve dishonoured my ancestors."
"Not from what I can see."
He looked up at me with eyes wet with tears. "I have. I’m a deserter... A disgrace to the 1st and my family."
The word deserter was like a punch to the gut but I tried to give him what I considered a reassuring smile. "No. No you’re not." With the toe of my boot I shifted my leg and tapped it against the metal rimmed tower shield propped up against the wall. Just over a metre in height and wider than my shoulders it was over ten kilograms of layered wood, canvass and steel; a heavy weight for anyone to bear. "Unless you are the most inept deserter in the history of the Empire I doubt you would have decided to flee with your shield. And your armour. And your sword. And your pack."
The smile that broke through the pain in his mind was more honest than before as I pointed to each piece of his equipment in turn. The first thing that any deserters, especially Legionaries did was to cast off their armour and other items as not only were they recognisable, but 40 kilograms of equipment slowed them down. Heart problem or not, this young Nord was incredibly fit to have run over ten kilometres in his full attire no matter how much adrenaline had been fuelling his limbs.
"Tonight they are going to come." I said simply and plainly, seeing the fear in his eyes that I hoped weren’t mirrored in my own. The terror that I felt was growing with every minute that I remained in the town but I knew I couldn’t show it. "And every sword will be needed." Gesturing to his sword and his pack where he had placed his whetstone I grinned fiercely while rising to my feet. "Are you really going to put all those hours you spent sharpening that damned thing to waste?"
His own grin grew bigger and his shook his head, more definitively than before. "No sir."
"Good. Those few here will feel better knowing the Legion fights with them tonight." Reaching down I helped him to his feet and lightly bumped my fist in the centre of his breastplate. "Dovah Invicta Hadrgar."
The slightest hint of confidence entered his eyes and the expression hardened. "Dovah Invicta Sir."
Carefully, he gathered his few items sitting on the table and around his chair and together we both walked back inside to Viconia and Ylfgar. Both were still deep in conversation and gesturing to the map but they turned and looked at the two of us as we entered.
"Hadrgar, this is Madame DeVir." I said simply, motioning to my companion as she gave the young Legionary a quick glance from his toes to his eyes. "Viconia; Legionary Ingrarsson."
Both Viconia and I smiled as the young man found himself not only tongue tied at Viconia’s rank and the realisation of our identities but also at her appearance. Obviously inexperienced with women and suddenly finding himself face to face with one of overwhelming exotic beauty the look of sheepishness and nervousness overwhelmed the fear at the situation we were in. It was something that Viconia didn’t fail to notice and she merely gave him a grin that left him both embarrassed and flustered.
"What have you learned?" moving over to the map I ran my eyes over the handful of marks they had made with charcoal sticks.
"Other than the fact that we are completely vithus?" She shrugged, ignoring the way that the Legionary was staring at her and myself with a dumbfounded expression on his face. "A lot of people have gone missing or have died in the past month."
With careful movements she pointed out the dozens of marks that were scattered about. "Nearly every farm, shack and house in the county have either been abandoned or their inhabitants have vanished. I guess that maybe three hundred people have died. That’s assuming that anyone missing is also dead."
"What’s the furthest place to be attacked?"
Ylfgar shrugged and pointed at the south western watchtower and a symbol marking out an abandoned mine to the south. "Both the messenger post on the Amber road and the old iron mine in the Pothole Caverns have been attacked. The caverns are where M’jadhi says he and his pack were holed up."
Looking over the map I could see the rough shape forming and felt my guts tighten even further. "Every death or disappearance has occurred within eight to ten hours march from Glenvar."
"That’s what we agreed on." Viconia shrugged. "But I don’t understand how Threnodir died against vampires in Nornalhorst but his body was found a few hours to the north."
"I don’t think that the Vampires I killed were the ones responsible."
All three of them looked at me, and I shrugged. "He was looking for them, and from what we read in his journal he appears to have been captured by them, but I think that it was left on his body on purpose."
"Why do you think that?" the expression of unease was growing on the bearded woodsman’s face.
"I think that having a vampire hunter arrive in town was a threat that no one could ignore. I think that he managed to escape from Nornalhorst, but on the way to get help he was killed by the real threat. Viconia and myself staying in town and actively looking into the disappearances was even more of a threat than a single vampire hunter so they left his body where it would be found and left the journal on him to throw us off the scent."
Moving closer to the map I took a piece of charcoal from Ylfgar’s fingers and roughly drew around all the marks annotating the extremities of the disappearances. It made a circle covering most of the county but I finished it off with a cross on the Village itself which was right in the centre.
"That’s a hell of a distance for anything or anyone to travel of a night." Ylfgar muttered as he looked over the furthest marks.
"How long would it take to ride on horseback from the village to the south west post and back?" I asked him.
"Six hours." There was a shrug. "Give or take."
"Plenty of time for a pack of lycanthropes to roam about, capture or eat a few people and return."
Ylfgar rubbed at his beard with both of his calloused hands and I looked at him again. "When was the last time anyone from the castle was seen in town?"
"A month at least..." He replied. "But that is far from uncommon. Those in the village haven’t seen Count Albric in over a year, and most of his servants and Men-at-Arms live in the castle itself. Do you really think that the those in the castle are Werewolves?"
I shook my head while staring at the map and the symbol of the castle. "I wish it was that simple, but whatever we are facing here it isn’t just a handful of cursed beast-men. I’ve never heard of werewolves hunting in packs, and they especially aren’t known for taking prisoners."
"That’s not including what we found in the Inn mrannd'ssinss." The wolf yellow eyes narrowed and Viconia made a point of looking directly at me.
Stepping forward and trying to appear useful, Hadrgar looked between the group of us looking pale but slowly regaining his composure. "What did you find in the Inn?"
The look that Ylfgar gave me at the change in the young Legionary was one of respect but he too was interested. "Abhuki was killed by a vampire just before, or even during the attack last night."
Hadrgar made the mark of Talos across his chest and I noticed how he traced a circle over the pommel of his sheathed gladius for good luck.
"I thought you killed them all." There was suspicion in Ylfgar’s eye and I nodded.
"I’m fairly certain I did." Some of my conversation with Volmyr the vampire lord returned to my mind and I frowned at the thought. He had spoken of others of his kind that sounded much like rivals and I gripped Sunchild tightly. "Maybe I killed the wrong ones. Maybe there were others."
"Vampires working with werewolves?" I wasn’t surprised at the scepticism in Hadrgar’s voice as I still had a healthy dose of it in my mind. "Sounds like something out of a play or a two-septim novel."
"Maybe not working together, but maybe like using hounds to flush out rabbits and foxes. I don’t think that a werewolf can be controlled but I doubt you’d find better hunters. They are the spawn of Hircine after all."
The signs of Talos and Stendarr from Hadrgar and Ylfgar respectively were not lost to me as I invoked the name of a daedric Prince. Despite my own corrupted nature, I too couldn’t help but make the sword of Talos over my chest; tapping my fingers against both shoulders, heart and sternum. "The castle has definitely been closed for weeks?"
"Aye, that it has. Some of us have suspected that’s where these bastards are coming from but no one has been willing to wait outside the gatehouse of a night to find out for sure."
"At this point it’s an extremely safe bet that’s where all this horror is stemming from." Breathing out heavily I glanced at the door leading to the balcony and thought of the castle sitting on top of the hill. "Is there any way inside?"
There was a gruff laugh and Ylfgar frowned. "Ha! Not without a few hundred more like this one here."
Hadrgar saw the gesture at his armoured form and shrugged sheepishly even as Ylfgar moved over and pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from a pile on the desk. What looked to be a ledger of some description of merchant caravans and their tithes was flipped face down before the woodsman began drawing.
"Three sides of the castle are built on sheer cliffs. The walls themselves are nearly ten metres high and the cliffs range from three metres to twenty. There’s a well that taps into the groundwater or an aquifer or something in the courtyard. Through it the entire thing is supplied with enough water for a garrison at least as large as the town. What run off there is comes out the west walls out of a grate barely large enough for a skeever to squeeze through, and that’s ignoring the iron bars blocking it."
"What about the southern walls? There looked like a plateau or something there."
"In a way there is. It connects to the eastern portion where the walls butt up against the highway by a tiny strip of land barely wide enough for a horse. But after a few metres it spreads out. There’s a building roughly.... Here." He stabbed the charcoal roughly three quarters along the walls towards the west. "That’s the Botany. There a few gardens and a greenhouse there that was built back when my granpappy was a boy. The countess had a thing for gardening back then."
"Any way to scale the walls?"
He gestured emptily about the room. "We’ve got enough to build some ladders but none of us are fighters and besides that, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone here willing to besiege the castle. Everyone here, myself included are quite happy waiting for the Legion. If we live that long..." There was a heavy sigh from him and he looked at Viconia and I apologetically. "Look, I know what you are thinking and I do appreciate the thought but there’s no way in all the hells you could get me to go into the castle. St Alessia, Reman Cyrodiil and Tiber Septim themselves could walk through the door right now and order me to and I’d tell all three of them to fuck off."
"Scaling the walls would only work with the correct preparation and success would only be guaranteed if the attackers were experienced or at least trained." Hadrgar added, the flush of embarrassment colouring his otherwise pale skin as we looked at him. "Fort Homestead has a few dozen engineers posted there and the 3rd Casta would be capable of sieging the castle."

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