Chapter 1: The Girl With No Voice

Eranica stood in the cool night air, looking up at the stars over Cyrodil, looking out into the forest surrounding Weynon Priory. She felt safe up there, on the roof of the chapel. Safe from the vermin of the forest, and safe from the person she'd come there to see. She'd been given a task but she wasn't sure she wanted to complete it. She wasn't sure she wanted to meet this Jauffre. She felt an obligation though. She was free from prison because of this task, and her honour bound her to its completion.

Life was simpler the week before. She'd been picking medicines in the field for her uncle, an apothecary. The sun shone bright over the fields. The breeze blew through the grass. The most exciting thing that happened to her that day was being charged by a hungry rat. She whispered the incantation her uncle had taught her and with a wave of her hand, she felt the rat's life force flow into her. She did it again, and then a third time and the rat was dead. She also knew the Flare spell, but she preferred to drain these poor creatures softly to sleep. The imps she was not so gentle with. Those she beat down with her bare hands, feeling a tingle of fear, anger, and loathing rising in her belly. She hated imps.

There were medicines to be picked though, and chores when she returned home again to her uncle's cottage. She kicked some dirt and dead grasses on the rat and went back to her search. She needed Columbine. Her uncle never told her why. He just told her what they look like and sent her to her task while he went back to his apparatus, grinding carrots up with Bolette Caps and Lady's Mantle. Larianna Daerune needed her night eye potions, and he had no time to explain what the Columbine was for. She was just a silly young girl, a Field Maid, whose lot in life was to run across country and back searching for pulp and seeds and petals and grasses and whatever else she could find.

Yes, life was simpler then. She should not have been complaining. If she'd known what awaited her back at the cottage she would have been more grateful for a peaceful summer day like that one.

There were men outside the door when she got there. Men from Cheydinhal she'd thought at first, as she approached. Customers perhaps. But when she saw her uncle being dragged out of the cottage by his hair and beaten over the head with a club, she knew these were no customers. Bandits maybe? Or worse.

No. Not bandits it turned out. Hired goons. Lowly thugs, sent to collect a debt her uncle owed.

The thug raised his club in the air once more, demanding money, and Eranica reacted without thinking. She launched a Flare spell and it bathed the man's face in flame, singing his facial hair away and knocking him back into the cottage with a startled yelp.

"What!?" he bellowed.

The men turned and saw her, and suddenly they were charging. She in turn charged straight at them and the first one she met was knocked backward with a fist to the throat. He stomped his foot into a bucket and fell over a low fence, gasping for air. The second man was ready for her though, and he bashed her fist aside with his shield. She stumbled backward and he struck. Boom! Everything went black.

She woke up in a cage on the back of a cart, being wheeled toward the Imperial City. The sun was setting and she couldn't see the faces of the men driving the cart. A man on horseback trotted up beside her though.

"Looks like she's awake, men."

Eranica said nothing. She spoke when she was spoken to, and even then only in a whisper. These goons didn't deserve the time of day in any case. She'd give them directions to Lake Poppad so they could go jump in it for all she cared. She was apparently a prisoner though. She needed to know why.

"I suppose it's my duty to inform you, little miss, that you're under arrest for common assault. We would have accepted payment of the fine from your uncle, but he didn't have the money. In any case, he's dead."

Dead? How? What happened!?

Still Eranica said nothing. She felt the familiar anger and rage boiling inside her though, the kind she felt when fighting imps.

Why hadn't they taken her to a cell in Cheydinhal? It was much closer. Why was she going all the way to the Imperial City? Obviously someone had plans for her that she didn't even want to know about, let alone be part of.

"We're taking you to the Imperial City's prison, child. You'll serve out your sentence there and then perhaps be sold to the guards as entertainment. A pretty young thing like you will pay off your no good uncle's debt easily."

She wanted to blast him with a flare spell in the face, but her hands were bound. She was a free citizen. She couldn't be sold off like a Khajiit slave. Apparently it was already decided however. She dropped her head onto the wooden floor of the cage and closed her eyes, saying goodbye to her uncle inside her heart.

She felt the weight of the soldiers' leering gazes as she was marched into the prison and shoved into her cell. She felt like a piece of meat dangled before hungry dogs, and she decided that she would die before she was reduced to sport for the amusement of these roughneck goons.

"Just throw her in this cell. She won't be in here long."

The door was slammed and locked, and the guard stood staring at her for a moment before chuckling dryly and heading back up the stairs.

And there was a dark elf across the hall from her cell. He wasn't making things any easier, going on and on about how she was a master of magicka, with cheap Breton harlot parlour tricks. She picked up a skull and threw it at him, but it bounced off the cell door and clattered to the floor. The dark elf laughed.

"You hear that?" he said. "The guards are coming! For you!"

Eranica tensed. The guards were indeed coming, but they weren't the same guards who'd thrown her in here. These people were different. More important.

"My sons, they're dead, aren't they?" an older man mumbled. He was dressed in the finest clothes Eranica had ever seen, and he looked most important of all.

"We don't know that, sire. My job is to get you to safety. We have to keep moving."

"I know this place," the older man said.

"What's this prisoner doing in here? This cell is supposed to be off limits."

Eranica was ordered against the wall and she obeyed.

The guards escorted the old man into her cell and warned her to stay back. The old man glanced up at her though and his eyes widened.

"It's you!" he said. "I've seen you."

She'd never seen him before in her life, and her first thought was that the old man was delusional in his advanced years. He seemed convinced though. He told her he was the Emperor and that he'd seen her in his dreams, and then something about today being the day. She just stared blankly, replying when she was addressed in her almost inaudible whisper.

One of the guards, a female of some importance, pressed a brick on the wall, and Eranica's bed rumbled away into the floor, and a passage opened up behind it.

"We'd better keep this one open. It doesn't open from the other side," the female guard said.

"Looks like this is your lucky day," the male guard said. "Just don't try to follow us."

They wandered down into the passage and disappeared around the corner. Eranica took one last look around, and decided on an impulse to follow them anyway. She would just stay back and disappear somewhere, try to make her way out of the prison and run for her life.

It turned out the guards were escorting the Emperor out of the city. He was the target of an assassination plot. As she crept along behind them several hooded men leapt from the shadows and attacked them. The female guard was killed but they kept moving.

Eranica found a sword and a katana on the woman's body. She picked them up with some relief. With those assassins lurking around she at least had some defence. No sooner had she sheathed it in her belt than a pair of rats burst through a crumbling wall and attacked, drawn by the smell of blood. She did away with them with the sword, too startled to use her Absorb Health spell. They fell at her feet.

The gate the emperor's guards had gone through was locked. She couldn't follow them, but there was a side passage where the rats had come through. There were caves, stinky old musty caves that looked like the ceiling could collapse in on her at any moment. But she had to keep moving, in case the prison guards came after her.

She made her way through the caves, wondering who'd dug them. How long ago? Why? There was an old well down here, and the skeleton of some long dead adventurer who'd died on top of his own weapons. She gathered them up and continued on, almost tripping over the corpse of a goblin. She hated goblins, even worse than imps.

The caves wound down and around beneath the prison. She smelled the thick smell of rot, and it was fresh rot, thick rank rot, not the old stale mouldy smelling rot that permeated the caves. Sure enough around the corner came the source of the smell — a zombie. Two rats fled before him and she fired her flare spell. She hit him once, twice, three times before he was upon her. He took one swipe at her and she hacked him down with the katana. He didn't get back up. So she hurried on.