Torin let Runil have his silence.
He understood. More than the old priest probably realized.
After years of hunting bandits. After uprooting encampments in every hold from the Reach to the Rift. Torin had seen things that would turn stomachs inside out. Had walked through caves that smelled of things no cave should smell of. Had found bodies stacked like firewood, had cut down men who laughed while they killed and women who smiled while they carved.
He'd learned, the hard way, that monsters didn't always have fangs and claws. Sometimes they looked like regular people. Sometimes they looked like the kind of person you'd pass on the road without a second glance.
There were bandits who killed because they needed coin and knew no other way. Desperate people, mostly, who'd been ground down by a world that didn't care if they lived or died.
Torin didn't enjoy killing them, but he did it knowing that was the job, and that desperation doesn't justify villainy.
And then there were the other ones. The ones who'd chosen banditry not because they were hungry or homeless or out of options, or because it was all they knew, but simply because they liked it. Because killing made them feel big. Because hurting people was the only thing that made them feel anything at all.
Torin had killed plenty of those, too, and enjoyed every minute of the process.
Runil, though? Runil had seen people kill for principle. For honor. For ego. For greed and profit and all the other reasons that wars got fought and cities burned. He'd served in the Great War, had marched under the Dominion's banner, had watched his comrades die for a cause that probably seemed a lot clearer back then than it did now.
But killing for fun? The casual, methodical torture of a young woman who'd never done anything to anyone?
That was outside his experience. Outside the neat categories he'd built to make sense of a world that had already broken him once.
It was only right that he was shocked. Only human. Or mer, whatever. Same difference.
Torin kept quiet. Let the old priest stand there with his bloody hands and his trembling fingers and his questions about a world that didn't care to answer. Let him sit with it for a while.
Auri was working.
Torin stepped back, giving her space, watching her move. She'd circled the table twice already, her eyes tracing every wound, every bruise, every mark on the girl's broken body. Her hands hovered over the flesh sometimes, not quite touching, like she was reading something written there that only she could see.
This was her area of expertise, not his. Torin could fight. Could track, could plan, could kill anything that needed killing. But this? Reading a corpse like a book, letting the dead tell their story through the marks left on their skin? That was Auri's gift. He'd learned to trust it.
Soon enough, the Bosmer huntress found something.
She stopped near the girl's left leg, crouching slightly, her head tilted at that angle she got when something didn't fit. Her finger extended, hovering just above the skin.
"This scar here." Her voice was quiet, focused. "It looks similar to the fresh wounds on her body. The same shape, the same depth. But it's old. Years old, maybe."
Torin moved in, intrigued. He crouched beside her, following her gaze.
Sure enough, there it was. A thin line of scar tissue, pale against the dead girl's skin, running along the outside of her thigh.
The edges were smooth, the color faded—the kind of scar that had healed a long time ago. But the shape of it, the curve, the way it cut across the muscle...
It was almost identical to the fresh lacerations that crisscrossed her body. The same pattern. The same placement. Like someone had taken an old wound and traced over it again, years later, in a different kind of violence.
Runil stepped closer, peering at the scar. He nodded slowly, something like recognition flickering in his pale eyes.
"Indeed." He reached for a cloth from a nearby table, dampened it with something from a small vial. "And it's not the only one she has."
He crouched, moving carefully, his old hands steady despite their trembling. With the cloth, he wiped at a spot on the girl's side—just below her ribs, where the skin had been cleaned but not stitched. Something dark came away on the cloth. Something that looked like wax, or...
Cosmetic concealer. The kind of thing a woman might use to hide a mark she didn't want the world to see.
Beneath it, pale and faded but unmistakable, was another scar. Same shape. Same depth. Same pattern as all the others.
Runil sat back on his heels, the cloth still in his hands.
"I started by hiding the scars," he said quietly. "For the family. They didn't need to see..." He trailed off, swallowed. "But it seems I missed that one." He looked at the scar, then at the fresh wounds on her arms, her chest, her stomach. "Now that I think about it, they do look identical. The old ones and the new. Almost as if..."
He didn't finish. Didn't need to.
Torin's face darkened. The implications were settling into his chest like stones dropped in still water, each one sending out ripples he didn't want to follow.
"You don't think she was being tortured even before she went missing, do you?" His voice was low, controlled. "Someone was doing this to her for years? And no one noticed?"
This wasn't someone having a bad day... this was premeditated malice of the darkest kind.
"Can you tell how old the scars are?" He looked at Auri. "If we figure out when the first scars appeared, we can figure out who was around. Who had access to her. Who might have..."
He just grunted, trailing at the end of his sentence.
Auri nodded, already moving closer to the table. Her focus had sharpened into that particular intensity she got when she was tracking something, when the world narrowed down to the trail and nothing else.
"Where else did she have scars?" she asked Runil. "Show me. All of them."
Runil looked increasingly uncomfortable—that was putting it mildly. His face had gone from pale to grey, his hands shaking as he reached for the cloth again. But he nodded, once, and got to work.
One by one, he wiped away the concealer. The scars were everywhere. Her side, her back, her shoulders, the inside of her wrists. Each one hidden beneath that waxy cosmetic layer, each one identical to the fresh wounds that had been carved into her flesh just days ago.
The same patterns. The same placements. The same deliberate, methodical cruelty, traced over like an artist returning to an old sketch to add new lines.
Auri studied each one carefully. She didn't rush. Didn't speak. Just looked, and thought, and moved on to the next. Her fingers hovered over the scars sometimes, not quite touching, reading something in the texture of the tissue, the way the skin had healed, the faint discoloration that spoke of wounds that had been left to close on their own without stitches or proper care.
Torin watched her work, his arms crossed, his jaw tight. The candles flickered. The shadows on the walls seemed to press closer.
Finally, Auri straightened. She turned to face him, her expression unreadable.
"The oldest scar appears to be about four years old." She paused, her head tilting slightly. "More or less. It's hard to be precise with scars this old."
Torin hummed, his mind already moving ahead. Four years. That was something. A timeframe to work with, a window to look for someone who'd been around then, who'd had access, who'd—
"The problem," Auri said, and her voice had shifted slightly, "is that all of them seem to be that old. Give or take a few months or weeks."
Torin froze.
His mind, which had been racing ahead, skidded to a halt. He stared at Auri, his eyes wide, his brain trying to catch up with what she'd just said.
"All of them?"
Auri nodded. "The scarring is consistent. Same age. Same healing pattern." She looked back at the girl's body, her expression grim. "Whoever did this did it in one setting. Somehow, she lived, survived, and then years later..." She spread her hands. "He came back to finish the job..."
Torin turned to Runil, his expression shifting from confusion to something heavier.
His voice was flat, processing. "But that doesn't make sense. Why wait four years? Why come back now? Why do it again the exact same way?"
Runil shook his head slowly, his face a mask of bewilderment. "I could not say." His voice was faint, strained. "I've been the priest here for years. I would have known if someone was..."
He gestured helplessly at the girl's body. "If someone was doing this. I would have seen something. Heard something. The Jarl's men would have—" He stopped, his jaw working. "For whatever reason, if this is true, she might have kept it hidden. The fact that she was abused so... so thoroughly, and no one knew..."
He closed his eyes. "That's not something a girl keeps secret without reason."
Torin couldn't help but feel a throb building in his temple—the kind of dull, persistent ache that came before a proper headache. Part indignation, part confusion, all of it twisting together into a knot behind his eyes.
This made absolutely no sense.
Why torture someone so cruelly, carve them up like that, and then just... let them go? Let them heal, let them live, let them walk around for four years with those scars hidden under their clothes and a secret they couldn't tell anyone?
How did the culprit make her keep quiet? Threats? Fear? Something worse? And why—why, after all that time, after she'd probably started to believe she was safe—why come back? Why kill her now, years later, in the exact same way?
Torin's mind raced through possibilities, discarding each one as it formed. A new kind of homicidal maniac, something even he hadn't encountered in all his years of hunting bandits and monsters?
Maybe. Stranger things existed in this world. But this didn't feel random. It felt deliberate. Planned. The kind of thing someone thought about for a long time before they acted.
Or maybe Auri was right. Maybe this was something for the Daedra—some kind of ritual, some offering to a Prince who demanded suffering in specific patterns.
The scars, the wounds, the long gap between torture and death... maybe there was symbolic significance to it. Some perverted logic that only made sense in the mind of someone who'd traded their humanity for a scrap of power.
Torin couldn't land on any conclusion that felt right.
But as he stared at the revealed scars—the old ones, the ones that had been hidden under concealer for four years—his eyes couldn't help but narrow.
They looked familiar.
Not in the way of something seen before, but in the way of a thing almost remembered. The shape of them. The placement. The way the scar tissue curved, crossed, and intersected.
It tugged at something in the back of his mind, some scrap of knowledge buried under years of memories.
All stray thoughts expelled. His brain squeezed down to a single point, hunting for that familiarity, trying to drag it into the light where he could see it.
Runil noticed him suddenly going still. The old priest took a half-step forward, his hand reaching out.
"Are you alri—"
Auri's hand shot out, catching Runil's wrist. She shook her head once, sharply. Let him think.
Runil hesitated, then nodded slowly, stepping back.
The candles flickered. The shadows held their breath. And Torin stood there, frozen, his mind turning over the scars like a puzzle box, trying to find the seam that would let it open.
One minute passed. Maybe two.
Then his eyes snapped into focus.
He turned to Auri, his hand extending.
"Your dagger. Lend it to me."
Auri blinked, confusion flickering across her sharp features. But she didn't argue. Her hand went to her belt, fingers finding the familiar grip of her blade—a slender thing, dwemer-forged, with an edge that could split a hair lengthwise.
She unsheathed it and placed the hilt in his palm.
"Careful," she said quietly. "It's very sharp."
Torin nodded, testing the weight of it. The blade caught the candlelight, glinting silver and gold.
"Good."
Then, without ceremony, without hesitation, he brought the edge across his own wrist.
A clean cut. Deliberate. Deep enough to bleed, shallow enough to heal.
Blood welled up immediately, dark red against his pale skin, running down his forearm in thin rivulets. The pain was sharp, bright, grounding—exactly what he needed.
"By the Divines!" Runil's voice cracked, his face going white as fresh snow. "Have you lost your—"
Torin raised his hand.
Not the bleeding one—the other. Palm up, fingers spread, a silent command for silence.
Runil's words died in his throat.
Torin's bleeding hand began to glow. A warm, golden light, soft at first, then brighter, spreading from his palm to his fingers, wrapping around the wound like a second skin.
Restoration magic.
He watched the wound close.
The edges of the cut drew together, knitting, sealing. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. The skin pulled itself smooth, fresh and pink, and then—
And then the scar formed.
A thin line of raised tissue, pale against his skin. The same shape as the scars on Eydis's body. The same curve, the same angle, the same pattern repeated a dozen times over on her flesh.
Torin held his wrist up to the candlelight, studying the scar with the same focus Auri had studied the corpse.
Then he looked at the girl on the table. At her old scars, hidden for years. At the fresh wounds that had finally killed her.
His jaw tightened.
"I know these scars. They're not from old wounds, but shoddily healed lacerations..."
Torin's voice was eerily calm. The kind of calm that came from somewhere deep, from a place where storms were born and waited, patient and terrible, for the right moment to break.
He lowered his wrist, the fresh scar catching the candlelight one last time before his hand dropped to his side.
His eyes moved from his own wound to the girl's body, to the old scars that looked years old, but were only minutes older than the fresh cuts.
"She was healed. Kept alive with magic. Just so she could continue to suffer."
Auri's face had gone very still. That was her way—the mask she wore when something cut too deep, when the only alternative was to scream or break or do something she couldn't take back.
However, her hands were shaking, just slightly, and her amber eyes had darkened to something that looked like old bronze left too long in the fire.
Runil made a sound that might have been a word in a language Torin didn't recognize. His hands were pressed against the edge of the table, his knuckles white, his whole body trembling.
The cloth he'd been using to wipe away the concealer lay forgotten at his feet, stained with the girl's secrets.
"By all the Divines," the old Altmer whispered. "By Arkay's mercy. To heal someone—to heal them—so they could be hurt again. That's not..." His voice cracked. "That's not something a healer does. That's not something anyone with a soul does."
Torin said nothing.
Because inside him, something was waking up.
Rage. Old rage. The kind he hadn't felt since that day on the Seven Thousand Steps, since Kyne's peace had washed over him and settled something that had been broken since he was an infant watching his mother die.
He'd thought that part of him was healed. Thought the visions, the pilgrimage, the goddess's touch had smoothed the jagged edges into something manageable.
He'd been wrong.
The rage was still there. Had always been there, probably, waiting in the dark places of his heart for a reason to surface. And now it had one.
It was almost overwhelming.
The urge to do something—to find whoever had done this, to make them pay, to hurt them the way they'd hurt her, over and over until they understood. The anger was a living thing inside his chest, breathing, growing, pressing against his ribs like it wanted out.
Torin took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out slow.
He couldn't afford to lose control. Not here. Not now. Not with Auri and Runil watching, not with Eydis's body still on the table waiting for justice. If he let the rage take over, he'd be no better than the monster they were hunting.
He'd hurt people who didn't deserve it. He'd make mistakes. He'd fail to find whoever did this... that could not be allowed.
He took another breath. And another.
The anger didn't leave. But it settled. Coiled itself tight in his chest, waiting. Patient. Ready.
"I'm going to visit Camilla's grave." His voice came out steady, controlled. "I need to think."
He turned toward the door, his boots heavy on the stone floor. Each step felt like wading through water, like the air itself had thickened around him.
Behind him, Auri's voice cut through the silence.
"Do you need company?"
Torin didn't turn around. Didn't slow.
"No." His hand found the door handle, cold iron beneath his fingers. "I just need some time to think."
The door swung open, and the fog rushed in to meet him, cold and damp, wrapping around his legs like the hands of the dead reaching up from their graves. He stepped through without looking back.
Behind him, he heard Auri say something to Runil, her voice too low for him to catch the words. Heard the old priest's broken whisper in response.
Then the door closed, and the fog swallowed everything.
...
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