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dirty-bosmer · 9 months

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Forgotten: Treacle

Here with my first and probably only @tes-summer-fest contribution of the year. I've been pretty busy this summer, but I'm happy to have participated at least once :)

Written for @atypicalacademic, who inspired me to continue Scar-Tail's story past his canon quest line. You were so right. He deserves happiness 🥲

summary: Scar-Tail, the wind calls, and the Hist remembers even if you refuse to. On the night you breached your shell, the Shadow blotted out the sky. It was to be your shroud for all your days, first to last, a gift you’ve disgracefully abandoned, and though you may run, the cold loving embrace of fate forever skitters in your wake.

Stop for only a breath. Look down, find it bloody, here, returned to you, blackened flesh under its claws, scrabbling at your heels.

warnings: non-graphic mentions of death and dissolution

Ao3 link: here

Scar-Tail doesn’t speak his name anymore, not even in his native tongue. He wonders, if enough time passes, will he ever forget its rhythm or will it quake within him always like a second bloodbeat? Some days he feels it trapped behind his teeth— the sibilant shape of it, the phantom weight of it, the gathering swell in the hollow pocket of his throat. The Hist still speaks it in his sleep where formless figures call him by the name his brother called him, and even in dreams the name is doused in venom. Even in dreams, the only ones who speak it want him dead.

The knife that sleeps beneath his pillow isn’t there when he reaches, but he feels it like the ghost itch of an amputated limb. His magelight flares. The looming darkness in the corner is revealed as merely shadow. Still he sleeps with the candle burning, for even shadow he is hesitant to trust these days as he was one once not very long ago, remembers that the darkness wears a sinuous smile, and he knows where it hides its teeth.

Two days, and he’s on the road again, a stranger bound to Nirn by a will and only a will. Rootless, unmoored, his body has become a foreign thing— spines ground down as the face sculptor recommended and belly fattened on unfamiliar foods. In Bruma, he discovered a taste for mead, and he likes it too much. The sweet amber color, the heady wave of its warmth. ‘Like drinking liquid sun,’ he told the barkeep, and it earned a laugh and another round on the house. These days he gets drunk on the smallest kindnesses. These days, he no longer feels like something trapped inside a jar.

If Ocheeva could see him like this, she’d recoil, wouldn’t recognize him. If Ocheeva could see him like this—

Citrine eyes in a face of jade scales. The memory sears sharp, but one day the fleshwork will heal the brand. He scratches at it, picks at it like an old scab, and strews the roadsides in eggshell and pale, stringy yolk as he births himself from the detritus of the life clinging to his heels.

Every new city demands that he is less of his past self, so he chokes it down and rolls new names on his tongue, hoping to forget the bitter taste of the Hist— Maheelus. Tanaka. Vetra-Mahei. Sings-in-Silver— but the sap runs through him like iron through a vein, and though Scar-Tail is fading, if the wind asked his name, what could he tell her? What could he offer if only breath?

—

Wake up one morning and find yourself dissolved beside the shadow left behind when Magnus pulled all darkness from the sky. When you leave the bed, you leave your old body too, a ghost peeled out from the pool that once was your lungs, and you wrangle its waters down a new stream, shape its banks to hold a new life. Touch the mirror. Touch your bare-faced spirit. Ask if it’s the same at the root now that you’ve stripped its branches clean. Become a new shape. Wear a new face that strangers wave to in the streets without fear, for you are a Saxhleel made of grafts. Look, all rough burls sanded down. Every scale is now smooth to the touch.

Yet the Hist still reads your scars, the ones you thought the magic had healed over, knows you bleed black sap when cut open. You are ku-vastei, cannot be gentled, will never be talcum soft, and when the Hist sees the man you’ve stuffed your soul inside of, it knows his smile required so many knives to be carved.

—

Salt crusts on his scales as the sea mist dries. “Haul,” the shipmaster says, and Scar-Tail does. He’s been in this town too long but the pay is good and the work is hard, and he’s come to find comfort in the foreign smell of human sweat. In the evening, his shift over, he wanders Taneth’s harbors for the breeze. There, Abrim finds him, always does. He guides Scar-Tail down to the taverns where the rest of his crew sits drinking away their gold, and Scar-Tail follows, drawn to his side like some heat-seeking whelp. Inside, he sits facing the door.

The torchlight throws dizzy shapes on the wall. The tavern churns, and all around him is a froth of people as thick as the head on his ale. He won’t feel the buzz until the fourth beer if he feels it at all, but even without it, he’s content here. Here in the briny stew of the seaport with the salt smell and the raucous laughter, the human heat wrapped around his shoulder. Willing himself to weightlessness, he lets Abrim rock him side to side in the rhythm of shanties he never had the chance to learn the words of. Even when he tries, the melodies don't fit in his mouth, but Abrim’s smile is reassuring. Abrim is gilded in the torch flame. Every part of him is a different shade of brown such that Scar-Tail needs only look at him in flickering light to feel he’s travelled all of Tamriel’s woods, seen every kind of tree there is.

—

Two weeks, and new callouses have formed on the pads of his palms. He relishes the rope burn, the way the thick braids abrade compared to the slender wires of a garrote wrapped tight around each fist. Staring at the old knots on his knuckles, he thinks, this is honest work. This is good work, and at night the only part of it that follows him to sleep is the vision of a stained shirt, gleaming skin in the sunlight, the sweat rolling off like beads of oil.

Abrim’s ship is packed and set to leave Taneth, and the next time Scar-Tail sees him, he knows it will be the last. The thought floods him with a new kind of fear. It sloshes cold in his chest, clings thick to every branch of his lungs. He thinks, this must feel like drowning.

But the evening air is dry and spiced in sunset reds. Scar-Tail breathes, regains his footing on solid land. At the taverns, Abrim is as he always is, and he is warm in color, deep in scent, rich in sea-spun stories that fill Scar-Tail with as much envy as they do wonder for the sailors and storm-weavers that long ago swam these waters. Scar-Tail wonders if the villains in these tales were star-made as he was, if their cradles were lined in rot like his nest was with razors. If born on a different day under the light of a different constellation, would they have been heroes? Would they have lived on forever in the hearts of men?

The tavern roar grows muffled at his ears as the crashing waves lull him into dream. He imagines himself a new life, resplendent in the awe of those who survive him, those who love him enough to sing his name to strangers too. In this life, his hands are bloodless. In this dream, he’s never held a knife. Could he have it one day? Can he live a small legend, erase enough of who he once was to one day hear his name spoken with full use of the tongue?

The wondering is ripe, ripe enough to overwhelm him. In the ale’s reflection, he sees the palimpsest he’s become. The pitted wound that is Scar-Tail forms a craggy mantle beneath his skin, and there is little give when he presses, the tissue tough beneath. He is still there no matter how hard he’s scraped, Scar-Tail, full of pride, a mutinous tremor through the din. Though it reaches him as only whisper, that name is wreathed in wire, and the recurved fang of its echo sinks deeper with every twist.

What will it take to strangle this voice that has stitched its dying breath inside his ears? When he hears it, he feels like a missing person, like a part of him has ceased to exist. A sickness rises inside him; he tastes himself decaying. For all the poisons he’s swallowed, now immune to, it’s the acrid tang of dissolution that sends him rushing into the night to spew his dinner into the sea.

Scar-Tail retches, turned over in a bout of vertigo. Abrim walks over and pats him on the back. “Uta-’mei, what’s wrong?” he says. “Can’t handle the drink? Come, let’s get you home.”

Scar-Tail coughs. “What did you call me?”

“I’ll explain it another night.”

“When?”

Abrim’s smile is a sliver of opal in the sandstone. “The next time,” he says, “Come on now. Stay close to me.”

And even if Scar-Tail never learns what Abrim meant, he knows that this name fits better than any he’s given himself before. He likes the feel of it, Uta-’mei, the liquor kick of it rising beneath the sour spit in his mouth, and decides that if he dies tomorrow with no one else to speak it, his ghost will scratch it into his own headstone before he completely disappears.

—

Wake up one morning and find the world you lived in gone to dust. You lay shipwrecked, bare to the bone, alone in the silver light of dawn. New flesh will have to be sculpted onto your frame, but you’ve paid someone do it before. You’ll do it again. This time, even your shadow has left you. ‘Good riddance,’ you say. You will have to remake that too.

The sand of your past life clings to your soles, chafes between every toe. You count the grains knowing it will be the last time its coarse edges erode you. Soon, you will bathe in cleaner waters, be free of it, be glistening, yolk-filled and new. Now that you’re here, and he’s gone—

No, now that he’s here, and you’re gone—

Scar-Tail, the wind calls, and the Hist remembers even if you refuse to. On the night you breached your shell, the Shadow blotted out the sky. It was to be your shroud for all your days, first to last, a gift you’ve disgracefully abandoned and though you run, the cold loving embrace of fate forever skitters in your wake.

Stop for only a breath. Look down, find it bloody, here, returned to you, blackened flesh under its claws, scrabbling at your heels.

Sweet child, the wind calls, have no fear. This shade was to preserve you from the blinding harshness of the day that will turn your eyes to water in your skull. Sweet child, look at you, so lost now. Look, curled up, all fetal, how your own reflection cows you. This shade was to serve you as much as you were to serve the god who wove it, and even with your claws clipped and your teeth hidden behind hand-carved grinning lips, your bones retain their shape, always will until you break them. Raise a hand. Press it to the foamy shoreline to obscure the rippling image beneath. Find each finger whittled to such a sharp point that your touch will forever bear the risk of drawing blood.

—

The shop windows taunt him from his periphery, but he will pass one hundred more if that’s what it takes to prove his presence. His footfalls are heavy, yet he persists, learns how to walk again, how to exert his body upon the world if only to feel it press up against his feet.

But it is enough to be above ground, free to float like a loosed leaf, released from the mire he was hatched into. The wind tugs on the knobs that are left of his spines, and if Scar-Tail lives, it is not in name but in this ever-changing shape, this new boundary layer surrounding each limb. And he chooses to live here. Here where the sun bakes the earth and the water pulls all moisture from his lips. Here, tasting the salt in the air, the sunshine golden-sweet, like mead. Drunk on its light, he chokes, spills past the brim, and when he laughs it’s because the first breath he ever took was smothered in darkness; all light he’d drank before had been drawn in through gasps.

One hand in the ocean, the water moves freely through his fingers. He couldn’t divert it, couldn’t destroy it if he tried. To his reflection, he offers the jagged slash of his smile, and he doesn’t care what gnarled image stares back. He says, “Name me. Call me by the sigh that leaves your lips when I’m within you. I shred myself apart to stand before you here, reborn, and did I tell you how it hurt, to push air out of these new lungs?”

The sun sets over the Abecean, bleeds a burnt orange that reminds him of the light that lived in Teinaava’s eyes when they were young. It is by some secret alchemy that a longing still brews for the brother who asked for his heart ripped clean from his chest. Yet he still feels it, yes, love for the brother who believes him now dead, who believes Scar-Tail had been the one to betray him. He will feel it always, he thinks. It’s the gift he’s given himself, to love unbidden, to love when no one wants it, to thirst for life in great bursts that swell within him like sap bubbling out of a wounded tree.

He cannot quell it, not even if he tried. It will ooze from him in the next life too.

Tomorrow, he will travel north to meet Abrim in Sentinel, or maybe he will cross the deserts and find another town to welcome him home, but when he leaves Taneth, he will shed his last skin, and he considers the last person to speak his name was a woman who had been hired to kill him. When she offered up his heart, what did his brother feel in return? Joy to have fed him back to the soil? Relief to return him to the root?

He hopes so.

#Scar Tail #the elder scrolls oblivion #tes fanfic #dark brotherhood #tesblr #I wrote most of this in the rainforest with @dumpsterhipster #wrote the rest on the plane home :D #treacle

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