image [https://i.imgur.com/UvduvtT.png]

The rest of our journey through the blighted ruins of Ourobe was far less eventful. It took time however, as the city spread far wider than Dune, and was bisected by a great many colonnades, aqueducts, and barren water channels that proved a trial to navigate — all bone dry for centuries.

I saw the winged Daedroth only once more. It (or a twin of it) hung upside down from the crumbling palisades of some long silent judicial court. It fluttered after our trail at some distance again, but when Keyes and I turned to face it together, it crawled into the shaded crenellations of a bleak temple, never to be seen again.

Keyes' condition continued to improve as well, and seemed to improve more at noon each day when we would stop in whatever shade we could find to allow him an opportunity to read the treatise and further reconstitute himself on its meager literary nutrition while I napped. He was nearly human looking again.

Sleep came easily to me, too easily in fact, since I was dying of hunger and dehydration. At some point I had to tell Keyes that I could no longer speak to him as we walked, for the cost to my parched throat and grossly swollen tongue (now as course as a bovine's) was becoming too severe. Each morning I still gathered what little dew I could off of grimy stone faces via an ice charm (although lacking a waterskin now, I had to chew the shards directly, crunching them and gathering no shortage of sand between my teeth — surely I ingested a good deal more of the cursed grit of that land than was good for me. I had long gone beyond mere hunger headaches and into a sort of constant state of vague uncertainty.

Truly, the desert favors the literary diet.

Eventually we found ourselves walking on a flat scrubland interrupted only by tufts of weed that ran uninterrupted into the distant cliffs of Corinth which rose like a great wall from one end of the horizon to the other. The odious sulfur stink which had ingrained itself in my nose was also suddenly absent and replaced by the clean warmth of dry grass.

We drifted through these weeds, grass tufts taller than any man, until a pit materialized before us like a mirage — a dry lakebed ringed with salt bars and the basin a sheer flat of white crystal. At the center sat a Daedric warrior-queen on a crystal throne. She had Dibella's own face, and skin the color of burnished copper.

By all reasoning we should have fled, or at the very least given her a wide berth, and yet I scrambled and slid down the caked dirt and rough packed crystal to the salt sheet below. Keyes followed me without comment.

She sat so still and so beautifully, with eyes, armor, and flesh the self-same color and of some otherworldly material. On her back she bore a massive ebony blade. She made neither movement nor sound until we were nearly beside her, perhaps two arms lengths away, when she bothered to turn and meet my gaze with sorrowful eyes and gestured with a hand that we sit before her.

We did so and would remain through the night, for she captivated us with a voice that hummed as though played over brass chimes. She spoke of her Daedric prince, who's name has been lost to all other mortal memory, and the dark blood pacts that bound her to the Eternal City of Ourobe. Salty tears ran freely down my filthy cheek (which I could scarcely afford) as she told us of the tragedies that had led to the downfall and her and her kindred, of their untold centuries trapped in the decaying ruins — and the eternity they were yet bound to endure.

I shan't record the details of it here in the name of brevity and to honor my strict purpose of conveying the ‘Tale of the Twin Manes’, but it was the honor of my life to hear her speak, and the tale haunts me still for I know somewhere out there she persists in her torment. But besides our tears there was nothing we could offer her. But I believe just sharing the story eased her burden, for a time at least, so with heavy hearts we bid her farewell and pressed southward to the distant blue cliffs of Corinth.

***

The scaling of the sheer cliff up to the highlands proved to be the easiest part of the journey by far (for me at least). As we crossed the plains the cliffs grayed and rose nearer to the clouds, and I found the morning dew far more generous and even wrestled out some herbs with edible roots — horribly bitter things but they filled my aching gut and gave it a little reprieve.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Keyes was also much restored, although for his own reasons. The Daedric warrior-queen's tale had proven a rare treat for him, and for all of its obscurity and detail had satiated his appetites beyond anything he had enjoyed in centuries. One morning I recall noticing his leg flesh had entirely mended while I had slept, and on another that his face (eyes and ears most notably) had returned completely to human proportions, making him almost handsome were it not for his deathly pallor. I even commented on his restoration as we walked one day, for I had regained enough strength by this point to speak.

He laughed, an oddly pleasant sound. "I'm more myself than I've been in years, enough for what is to come perhaps," he looked towards the looming cliffs ahead. "You know they say when the world was young, giant creatures lived here, and the cliffs of Corinth were but foothills to them."

"If only we were giants."

"We are still great in our way," he said, and damned if he didn't wink at me, droopy eye and all, "and you may find the journey easier than you expect on account of your kindness, charity, and patronage of this poor reader on his quest for an end."

I had grunted in agreement, not entirely sure what he meant, but would learn the following afternoon after he led me to the foot of the cliffs. To say that they towered over us would be an understatement, for they actually rose forward from their base before tapering into a purely vertical climb into the heavens themselves, giving the uncomfortable impression they somehow buried us as they obscured the sky.

"We'll have to find a way around," I said, "surely there's a merchant passage carved into the stone somewhere. But how much time will we waste while the Mane's army marches off towards insanity?"

"No time," Keyes assured me, "for we will climb straight up here."

"There's no hell that could drive me to climb this, it's all I can even do to keep walking."

"You won't need to do anything. Here, strap yourself to my back and I shall carry you, the treaties, and Elsweyr's fate — for I have dined on her deepest mystery and will not now be denied my half finished desert."

I drew off my tattered headwrap and cinched it around Keyes’ waist, binding me to him as a sort of buttocks support that caught much of my weight while my arms locked tight around his neck and chest. His flesh was cool and firm as shifting metal where his threadbare robe left it exposed to mine.

He waddled a few steps under me, and for all his earlier gall I thought he might buckle under my weight as his spindly legs fought for purchase. But then, as if something clicked into place within him, he leapt up to the rockface and gripped it. The tips of his fingers clung to the smooth surface, visually identical to any man’s pressed on glass, yet they stuck as securely as any slugs belly to the surface. He started pulling us up one hand at a time.

I screamed as I felt gravity bend my spine backwards towards the ground — and surely a broken neck if I fell — but managed to lock my arms around his neck ever tighter — a cold sweat slicking my palms. Any mortal would have choked under my headlock but Keyes pressed forward in his usual dull manner as if he were doing nothing more than meander about his bookstore.

The desert shrank below and the incline gradually grew to favor us, leaning forward somewhat with occasional flat dirt patches inhabited by sturdy bushes. I allowed my arms to relax somewhat, twitching in fear only at the occasional crumple of falling dirt onto my face that had been disturbed by one of Keyes’ searching hands.

My greatest challenge was no longer the impervious cliffs of legend, but rather my own exceedingly pervious butt crack, for you'll recall I wore only a girded loincloth at this point, and under the constant swaying of my ad hoc butt-sling the loincloth’s fabric did become continually embedded in my rear end — and I dared not spare a hand to pick it loose at those queasy heights.

After an afternoon of this was enough, and I asked Keyes to pull us off onto a stable ridge to adjust my strap. Specifically I looped my former penitent’s gown once over each bare upper thigh (passing underneath) and then led each end up, behind my shoulder blades, before then pulling them forward and knotting both ends together in front of Keyes' throat. It constricted my legs to numbness while I was suspended on Keyes’ back, but my drumsticks weren’t of much use at the moment anyway; and in addition to unwedging my rump, the ‘pulley-style’ system spared my bare thighs from being rubbed raw by Keyes' robe.

Forgive me now if I have gone into too much detail, but I wish to depict the means by which I resolved this predicament with the hope this information will serve you well should you find yourself in a similar situation. I feel it is my duty to document this best practice for the posterity of the many posteriors to come — for we each have but one behind in this life.

Following that solution, we stopped to rest only twice on my account, for Keyes did not sleep or require rest so far as I could tell. I slept uneasily when we did, however, as I was plagued by ugly dreams and a constant fear that I might roll off the cliff while unconscious. Needless to say, I woke in a panic and was grateful that Keyes was always ready to resume travel and expedite our delivery from that damned cliff.

Finally, we reached the summit, or near enough that I could unstrap and resume walking and climbing the many small highland plateaus strewn with stunted trees. Behind us the plains were a dusted blur that led back to the blighted ruins of Ourobe, which I saw then as they truly were — a great series of uneven concentric circles littered with broken ziggurats, colonnades, and half buried temples. The sight of it haunted me, but not nearly as much as the then unseen city of Dune which lay somewhere far beyond in the tides of sun blasted sand. Aiera, Benezia, and my deviator brother were all out there somewhere, likely already on the march with the forces of the Mane of Dune on his mad crusade against himself. With a sigh I turned and wrapped my tattered gown back over myself as a rough shawl against the nipping cold highland breeze.