The afternoon sun, what little of it managed to pierce the perpetual gloom of Falkreath, hung low and pale behind a blanket of clouds. The hall of the dead sat at the edge of town, surrounded by fog that curled around the gravestones like fingers, by ancient pines that towered overhead, their branches blocking out what little light managed to filter through.
The air smelled of wet earth and old stone and something else—something that might have been memory, or might have been the dead themselves, breathing through the cracks in the soil.
Torin knocked on the door and took a step back, waiting.
Beside him, Auri stood with her arms crossed, her hood up against the damp, her eyes scanning the treeline with that habitual alertness she never seemed to turn off. She'd been quiet since they left the shrine. Quiet even for her.
Torin understood...
His body was here, on this doorstep, in this fog. But his mind was still back on that hillside, watching Krovos's face across the fire, trying to fit the pieces together in a way that made sense.
He'd gone over it a dozen times. A hundred. The man's words, his reactions, his lack of reactions. Every detail Torin could remember, he'd picked apart and reassembled, looking for the crack that would let him see through.
He didn't have anything conclusive. That was the problem.
He'd called the killer a spineless coward. Had let the words hang in the air, watching for any flicker of offense, any tightening of the jaw that would mark a man who'd been insulted. Nothing. Krovos had just nodded along, like Torin was stating the weather.
He'd called the victims innocent. Helpless. People who didn't deserve what happened to them, and still bo reaction.
Torin had encountered all manner of opportunistic brigands, bloodthirsty maniacs, and even malicious men with dark purposes, and he knew from experience that someone like that would have reacted to such blatant provocation.
He would have needed to justify, or deflect, or argue. Would have had something to prove. Krovos had just shrugged. Which could mean he was innocent.
Or it could mean he was something worse than a simple killer. A professional. The kind of man who'd learned to let words slide off him like water off stone, because caring about what people thought got you caught.
But a professional wouldn't have asked about their business. Wouldn't have drawn attention to himself. Would have kept his mouth shut, his head down, and let the strangers pass through without a second glance.
Torin's jaw tightened.
Auri hadn't smelled anything either. That was the other thing. She'd gotten close to Krovos—close enough to see the sword under the furs, close enough to read his face—and she'd told Torin afterward that there was no blood on him. None that belonged to men or mer, anyway.
The hare was fresh. The camp was clean. The sword hadn't been used in a while, that much was obvious from the state of it—clean, but not freshly cleaned. No lingering scent of violence.
And besides that sword, hidden away under furs like he was ashamed of it? Krovos wasn't equipped to kill people. He had a hunting knife, a bow Torin had spotted leaning against the statue, a few dozen stakes for traps. Nothing that suggested he'd been tracking anything more dangerous than game.
Other than the fact that he was out in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, camping at a Talos shrine with a sword hidden under his bedroll and a burning desire to catch a killer on his own...
Torin really had nothing against him.
But he couldn't shake the feeling.
Something about Krovos had crawled under his skin and settled there, a splinter he couldn't dig out. The way the man looked at them. The way he talked about the murders.
The way he'd said why not me like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Krovos was exactly what he claimed to be—a hunter who'd gotten tired of waiting for the Jarl's men to do their jobs, who'd decided to take matters into his own hands. Torin had done the same thing, more times than he could count. He couldn't fault a man for wanting justice.
But he couldn't stop being suspicious either.
Still, Torin's chain of thought was snapped like a bowstring the moment the door before him suddenly swung open.
He couldn't help but smile.
Runil stood in the doorway, his robes stained with something dark and wet that Torin's eyes recognized a beat before his brain caught up. Blood. The old Altmer's hands were crimson to the wrists, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and his face was twisted in an expression of pure, incandescent outrage.
His mouth was already open, already forming the first syllables of what was clearly going to be a blistering scolding about interrupting important work and showing respect for the dead and what kind of barbarian knocks on a door at this hour—
Then his eyes landed on Torin.
The words died in his throat like a candle snuffed by wind.
His hands, bloody as they were, dropped to his sides. His shoulders, tensed for a confrontation, sagged. And his eyes, those pale Altmer eyes that had always seemed so out of place in a Nord's priesthood, widened with something that might have been surprise or might have been relief.
"Torin?" His voice cracked slightly on the name. "What brings you here, my boy?"
Torin smiled—genuinely, this time. It was good to see Runil. Better than he'd expected, actually. The old elf had been kind to him when he'd come looking for Camilla's grave, years ago, and on other encounters. Hadn't asked too many questions. Hadn't judged. He just helped whenever he could.
"I'm here to figure out the town's murder mystery." Torin reached into his pocket, fingers finding the small seal he'd tucked away before leaving Winterhold.
He pulled it out, letting the light catch on the silver emblem—the College's symbol, a stylized sunburst over a tower.
With deliberate slowness, he pinned it to the fur on his shoulder, next to the silver hawk amulet that had once belonged to a god-emperor. "Arch-Mage Savos Aren of the College of Winterhold sent me."
Runil gave him a blank, confused look. The kind of look a man wears when he's been told the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
"The arch-mage of the College?" He blinked, his bloody hands twitching at his sides. "I thought the Jarl asked the Companions for help."
Torin shrugged, the motion easy, casual. "It's a long story. Kodlak already sent word ahead to the Jarl—he should already know I'm here, and why."
He paused, letting that settle. Then he cleared his throat, glancing pointedly past Runil into the dim interior of the hall.
"So. Are you going to invite us in, or are you going to keep us standing out here in the fog until we turn into gravestones ourselves?"
Runil blinked again, processing. Then his expression cleared, and he nodded quickly, stepping back from the doorway.
"Of course. Of course. Do come in." He began to turn, then hesitated, his gaze shifting to Auri. "Though the young lady might prefer to wait outside."
His voice softened, took on the gentle cadence of a priest delivering bad news. "I'm preparing the latest victim for burial. It's... not a pretty sight."
Auri chuckled.
Not a mean laugh, not a mocking one. Just... a chuckle. The kind of sound someone makes when they hear something so far from their reality that they can't help but find it funny.
She didn't say anything. Just met Runil's eyes with that calm, amber gaze, and waited.
Torin shook his head wearily, already moving past Runil into the hall. "This is Auri, by the way." He waved a hand vaguely in her direction. "I wouldn't worry about her."
He strode inside, boots echoing off stone floors, his eyes adjusting to the dim light.
"The quicker we get to the bottom of this," he called back over his shoulder, "the sooner I can get back to the College."
Behind him, Auri followed suit, her steps nearly silent.
"And the less likely that another will die," she added, her voice soft but carrying.
Torin just gave her a wave. "Yes, yes... that too."
Runil just frowned, standing in the doorway for a moment with his bloody hands hanging at his sides. He looked at Torin's broad back, at Auri's small, sharp figure disappearing into the shadows of his hall, at the fog curling around the gravestones outside.
Then he shook his head slowly, closed the door, and followed them in.
...
The hall of the dead was a place of shadows and candles.
They flickered in their iron sconces, dozens of them, lining the walls and clustered around the shrines, their flames wavering with every draft that slipped through the cracks in the wooden walls.
The afternoon sun, weak as it was, added its own pale light through the windows—thin beams that cut across the room and illuminated the dust floating in the air, turning it to gold for a moment before it sank back into darkness.
Shrines of Arkay stood at intervals, their carved symbols of the death god stark against the stone. Banners hung between them, faded with age, their colors long since leached to grey and cream. The room smelled of incense and old blood and something else—something sweet that Torin recognized as the herbs Runil used in his embalming work.
At the far end, on a wooden table raised slightly higher than the rest, lay the corpse.
A young woman. Naked, her skin pale as candle wax in the dim light, her dark hair spread beneath her head like a halo.
She was no older than twenty. Maybe even a few years younger. Hard to tell now, with her face slack and empty, with the life drained out of her so completely that she looked more like a sculpture than a person.
Her body was a map of violence.
Cuts and lacerations covered her—arms, chest, stomach, thighs. Some were shallow, barely more than scratches that had crusted over with dried blood. Others were deep, the kind of wounds that would have taken her to the edge of death again and again before whoever did this finally let her fall.
Some had been stitched shut. The thread was neat, careful, the work of someone who cared about the result. Others were still open, the edges of the wounds curling slightly, the flesh beneath dark and dry.
Torin glanced at Runil, then back at the corpse.
The stitches were the old Altmer's handiwork. He was preparing her for burial, making her look... well, not good. That wasn't possible. But presentable. Giving her family something to look at that wasn't just a catalog of horrors.
Her death had already broken their hearts well enough. They didn't need to see her like this.
But the stitched wounds meant evidence lost. And the other victims—there had been others, Runil had said, before the first bodies started showing up where people could find them—had already been buried. Weeks ago, some of them.
The chances of digging them up now, of examining them without being branded a necromancer or worse, were slim to none.
Inconvenient. Very inconvenient.
But this one would have to do.
Auri had already started circling the table, her steps slow and deliberate, her head tilted at an angle that Torin had learned to recognize. She wasn't just looking at the wounds. She was reading them.
He waited.
"It doesn't look like the work of a professional." Auri's voice was quiet, almost thoughtful. "At first glance."
She stopped near the woman's left arm, her eyes tracing a long cut that ran from elbow to wrist.
"Someone like that—someone who's done this before, someone who knows what they're doing—would know how to inflict more pain without endangering the victim's life."
Torin hummed low in his throat, the sound echoing off the stone walls.
"I agree." He let his eyes drift over the girl's face—what was left of it, anyway.
The bruises had settled into deep purples and blacks, spreading across her jaw and cheekbones like storm clouds. Her lips were split in three places, the wounds cleaned but still raw.
"She doesn't look like someone with secrets worth keeping. And she sure as hell doesn't look like someone who'd endure half this torture without breaking."
He turned to Runil, who stood near one of the shrines with his bloody hands clasped in front of him, his face a mask of priestly composure that didn't quite hide what was underneath.
"Her name is Eydis," Runil said quietly. "Eydis, daughter of Hrogar. I didn't know her personally—I try not to get too close to the living, in my line of work—but she seemed a pure enough soul. Smiling often, from what I saw. Her father's a woodcutter. Mother's a seamstress. Good people. Honest."
Torin let out another hum, longer this time.
"Do they have any enemies that you know of?" He watched Runil's face carefully. "Did she or anyone in her family so much as argue with someone lately? A bad deal, a broken promise, someone who might hold a grudge?"
Runil shook his head slowly, his pale hair catching the candlelight.
"Not that I know of." He looked back at the girl, his expression crumpling for just a moment before he caught himself.
"Her family are simple folk. They don't have much, and what they have, they worked for with their own hands. It's hard to imagine someone holding such a..." He trailed off, swallowing hard. "Such a deep grudge against them. I just don't understand why anyone would do something like this."
Torin grunted, crossing his arms over his chest. The leather of his vambraces creaked in the silence.
"For fun." He ticked off the possibilities on his fingers. "For the satisfaction of some up-jumped conceptual force in Oblivion. Or just for some ritual we don't know about." He shrugged. "Take your pick."
Runil stared at him.
His face had gone very pale—paler than usual, which was saying something for an Altmer who spent most of his time indoors. His hands, still stained with Eydis's blood, had started to tremble slightly.
"F-Fun?" The word came out strangled. "What kind of creature would commit such atrocities for fun?"
His jaw tightened. His eyes, usually so gentle, went hard.
"Even those Thalmor bastards didn't—"
He stopped. Abruptly. Like he'd run into a wall.
His mouth snapped shut. His gaze dropped to the floor, suddenly very interested in the flagstones beneath his feet.
Torin raised an eyebrow but didn't bother to comment.
The old Altmer's past was his own business. His former associations, whatever they'd been, whatever he'd done or seen during the war—that was buried with the rest of the dead, as far as Torin was concerned.
Runil was one of the few people in this province Torin considered a friend. Or at least a very amicable acquaintance. That was enough. More than enough.
He let the moment pass, the weight of Runil's near-confession settling into the space between them like dust on an old tomb.
"For every bastard you think is the worst thing to ever walk..." Torin said finally, his voice carrying a dry humor that didn't quite reach his eyes, "There's another bastard just dying to prove you wrong....that's just how the world works."
Runil looked thoughtful at those words. His pale eyes drifted to the girl on the table, Eydis, daughter of Hrogar, woodcutter's child, seamstress's daughter, someone who'd lived with a smile.
Something in his expression shifted. Not grief, exactly. Something older. Something that had been there for a long time, waiting for a moment like this to surface.
He went silent. The candles flickered. A draft slipped through the cracks in the walls, making the banners shift and whisper.
When Runil finally let out a breath, it was long and heavy, the kind of sigh that carried decades with it.
He was an old soul, this Altmer priest who'd traded war for peace, blood for incense, the Dominion's ambitions for Arkay's quiet service. Even if his years in Falkreath had been peaceful—and they had—he still knew.
He'd seen. He'd lived through the Great War, had worn a different robe and served a different master, had walked through fields of corpses and watched cities burn.
He knew the atrocities men and mer were capable of inflicting upon one another. Knew the darkness that lived in the spaces between civilizations, between laws, between the stories people told themselves about who they were and what they would never do.
But this?
His eyes lingered on Eydis's face, on the bruises and the cuts and the stillness of her, and his expression crumpled, just for a moment.
It was just another sort of atrocity, albeit one he wasn't familiar with...
...
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