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ehlnofay · 9 days

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Pax should have said no.

Damn it all, they should have said no. Should have said go to hell and fucked off back – stop contacting me, sort out your own shit – but they didn’t, fuck knows why, and now they’re stuck here.

(They know why. They know exactly why; absolutely anything would be better than fucking off back to Cyrodiil. What’s for them there?)

But there’s nothing worth staying for here either, and now she’s crammed in between strangers on a long table, everyone dressed in fabrics she’s never seen with dyes so saturated they seem almost gory, eating stuff that isn’t food and talking loud enough to make her want to hurl a glass into the wall. It’s bizarre. The woman next to her, ruddy-faced and bald, wears a headpiece that shines like the sun the Isles doesn’t have; the other side is taken up by a stranger in a bone-white porcelain mask who has not moved but to swill the wine around in their glass. There’s scarcely room for Pax’s chair. It all feels like such a baffling pantomime of aristocracy (she's known the real thing well enough – feasts and toasts and luxurious gifts she had no use for, and if she doesn’t stop thinking about it she actually will throw a glass), bright colours and rich settings and a god taking offerings at the head of the table.

At least, Pax thinks, no-one tries to talk to him; they’re too busy fawning over their lord. Which is probably to be expected; but it all feels so strange, so unsettling, the way they all lean in towards it like flowers turning to face the sun, like seaweed dragged at by the inescapable pull of the tides. They grow towards it through the cracks in the air, matter moving toward the inevitable centre, as if they can imagine nothing more than this.

(Even more unsettling is the way it responds in kind, listening attentively to anyone who speaks to it, leaning in as though to kiss them, as though to swallow them whole. All hell, why did Pax agree to this? Why did they come?)

(They should have told it to fuck off. Should have said no way, I don’t want to help you, don’t want to get involved in anything you’d need my help for. I don’t owe you anything. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m done.)

(Pax is done. Pax is sick to death of all this shit; doesn’t want to deal with this, the vaguely described problems of a god that picks people apart like it’s unravelling a thick yarn shawl. Doesn’t want to deal with anything like this. He’s had his fill of gods.)

(Why is he still fucking here? Why did he agree to this? This is no better than eating in that weird fucking inn in town. This is no better than –)

(That’s a lie. It’s a bit better than Cyrodiil. Just as much a shithole, but it pulls the rug out from under him often enough that he doesn’t have time to think too much.)

“Not hungry?” says a prowling voice, coiling catlike into the plaits in their hair, and Pax jumps enough to jostle the masked bastard sitting ramrod straight next to him.

He looks up.

At the empty placemat across from him sits a figure veiled in gossamer, glittering in the glow of the lit-up lichen on the distant throne; the fabric of its endless shawls pulls apart at the ends, peeling away from itself, shedding patches like iridescent insect wings every time it shifts. If Pax squints, they can see through it to the grand marbled wall behind.

She glances back at the chair at the head of the table, where something lounges, eyes dripping gold, intricately carved cane laid across its knees; its too-many fingers are laced with the hand of a man whose gown blooms floral. Flatly, she says, “What the fuck?”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Sheogorath asks, pouting; she can hear it laughing down the other end of the table. “It’s a proper feast. We pulled out all the stops.”

Pax shifts their eyes away to peer down at their plate. “You have served me worms,” she says. She flicks the dish with a fingernail. “In jelly. With flowers.”

“Larva, actually,” Sheogorath replies. It’s still at the other end of the table. It doesn’t seem eager to explain this. When it smiles, the gossamer falls away; its whole face splits in half.

It’s all so fucking stupid. Pax takes a deep breath – in through the nose, ignore all the odd spiced smells, and out – and does not yell at it, or try to hit it, because she’s gotten herself into a situation where that’s not really an option, because she’s a fucking idiot. Why didn’t she just say no?

(She knows why.)

The Mad God’s teeth flash bright as the ornate silver cutlery. Its chair scrapes back from the table. “It melts in your mouth,” it tells her, eyes glittering, “but I won’t make you try it. Walk with me?”

The figure still sits at the head of the table, snatching something from someone’s plate, always, always laughing. Its limbs sprawl like tentacles, like the silken threads of a tapestry, to encompass the whole room. The dinner guests stare as though bewitched, bedevilled, beguiled. Not one of them is looking at Pax. If he were to drop dead with his face in the food his corpse would not be discovered until sunrise.

Pax sniffs and shoves his chair back from the table. He lets Sheogorath (the second Sheogorath – but it must be, what else could it be?) lead him through a narrow door into some winding hallway, the walls lined and rimed with ornate coloured-glass windows. (It’s so much quieter. Still as garishly bright, but Pax is getting the sense that that is inescapable, here; the clothes they wear, as crumpled and covered in travelling-grime as ever and startlingly out of place against the odd jagged finery of the dinner party, seem unimaginably dull in comparison. Everything seems unimaginably dull in comparison.) Outside the windows, they can catch glimpses of the city – its winding, lamp-lit streets, the jumbled mess of its architecture, the sky arcing above it like a child’s attempt at watercolours. Pax wants to smash it, tear it down.

There’s no sun here, but still it’s night. The sky has shifted to purple and black.

“Isn’t it nice?” says their companion; when they look back, it’s nothing more than a shifting impression in the stained-glass window, a series of hairline cracks. It still manages, somehow, to smile at them.

It’s not. The sky is a shadow and the flamboyance of the palace is scraping at their spine. “Sure,” Pax says flatly. When she flexes her fingers, the bruising staining the base knuckle of her thumb aches.

Sheogorath looks at her – an ancient man leaning on a stick, a flickering painting, a bloody corpse, a little girl in velvet-red skirts, a breath. In its mercurial shifting she catches the flowery blossom of the man at the table’s collar, an unpleasant glimpse of her own braided hair, the smell of sulphur. It tips its head. She can’t focus on it anywhere but for the eyes.

“You don’t like my dinner parties,” it announces, as though it’s a revelation, a tragedy; its body crumbles like sea cliffs slowly eroded by the ways. It’s annoying – bloody obnoxious, and incomprehensible, and kind of weird that it noticed, that it would even care. (She’s never liked dinner parties. Nobody ever commented on it before.)

I’ve had well enough of them, Pax could say, or no, I don’t like you, but it’s the fucking Mad God, Daedric Prince of – Pax doesn’t even know what, he’s never known much about this shit, only that it’s well worth avoiding. Prince of the mad and the missing and the foolish, of breaking and breaking and putting yourself back together backwards. She should have said no, but she didn’t, and who knows what would happen if she went back on that now?

It's slinking closer. All that stay static enough to make out are eyes and teeth.

“Pax, yes?” it says, soft-voiced – a hand lands on his arm, small and dry and shivering, the skin as thing as a mouldering leaf. “You have no obligations here. If you want to be on your own, be on your own. We’ve plenty of space for it.”

Pax’s eyes narrow. He does not jerk away from it.

In the light of the coloured sky, the coloured windows, its face is phantasmagorical. “If you don’t want to be here,” it continues – still so skin-pricklingly gentle – “then your hand will not be forced. I’ll speed your way home if you wish.”

They can’t help but twitch at that. It’s setting their teeth on edge. (It’s lying – has to be. After its ages of coaxing them in, meting out information, not telling them where they were until they were on its doorstep, it would not give them the chance to leave.) Rough, still covered in road-grime, Pax asks, “Why should I believe you?”

(None of them have ever given them the chance to leave.)

Sheogorath, a figure of hollow skin and bone, inclines its head. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Pax,” it says. Its eyes are wide and bulging, whites on full display like a frightened horse; it grins again. “Others might. But we’re not a monolith. We’re not even especially similar.”

Pax bites down on the flat edge of their tongue. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

The light coming in through the windows flickers. The Mad God turns to meet it.

“I’m the youngest,” it says, its voice glittering like mist on the air. “Did you know that? I don’t remember the world without you in it.” Its form spasms, volatile, wings and limbs and eyes like a snail’s on stalks sprouting and choking and subsiding back into its mass. “I’m closer to you than any. I understand, almost.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Pax repeats. She’s gritting her teeth, tonguing at her gums where two are missing. Are two devil-gods not enough to deal with for a lifetime? Is there really going to be more of this now, too?

Rolling through the air like smoke, the voice says, “It will.”

Pax presses purple-green knuckles to her mouth. Her teeth dig into the soft meat of her lip.

Sheogorath turns to face her, hair moving as though blown by the wind, as though tugged by the tides. It sighs. “You don’t believe me,” it says. Its tongue pokes through its teeth. “That’s perfectly fine. Clever, even. But if you want to leave, all you need to do is tell me so.” It pauses, then; the train of its strange, gnarled crown shifts over its shoulders when it moves its head. “Or just leave. The door is still open.”

“You’d be fine with me just leaving,” Pax rasps around his knuckle, “after weeks of not leaving me alone?”

(Of begging him to come, poorly-hidden agitation giving way to blatant franticness, half-swallowing the fear that choked its face in every mirror it spoke to him through. Of begging him still, after he got here, after he met it – begging in a roundabout manner, casual as anything, its every motion reeking of fear. Its abject terror when he turned to leave. You’ve come this far. Why not hear an old man out? Pax told it that it wasn’t an old man, that he didn’t give a shit either way, and it slid through a child, a monster, a sulphur-burned body coughing blood, his own shuddering form in armour he hasn’t seen in months, and it said please.)

(Regained its composure, its gentleman’s face, immediately afterward. But it – the Mad God, unknowable, inconsolable – said please. Pax still doesn’t know what to do with that.)

The Mad God, now, shrugs. Taps at the hairline cracks in the stained glass windows. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” it says, one pair of hands braiding something intricate into its beard. The hand on the glass slips down. “I told you. I do need a champion.”

“And I told you,” Pax bites, something aching and ugly surging in their gut, “not to call me that again.”

A smile, bloody-mouthed and beaming. “But we will abide,” says Sheogorath, and digs its fingers into the cracks of the stone. One brick slides loose, mortar dug up under its nails. It offers it up.

Pax licks their teeth and takes it.

The brick shivers, momentarily – crumbles, in their hand, like sand slithering through their fingers, and left in their palm is a hardy slip of bone. Spiked and sprawling, carved with intricate patterns; it arranges itself around an oval of empty space, the perfect size for four sharp-knuckled fingers.

“You can always leave,” the Mad God tells them, and for a moment it does look so very young and strangely, staggeringly hopeful. “But give it a chance. I think you could love the Isles, if you choose to.”