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

They loosened the chains about my ankles and I made a graceless landing of it, going face first onto the gritty floor. With numb feet and manacled hands I shambled over to a stool beside their barrel-turned-table. Benezia lit a lantern as Caius dumped a satchel full of rustling documents before me. My head’s throbbing had already been reduced to a dull ache.

"You have until sunrise to tell us something we don't already know or the deal is off and I will have you taken to tell your story to the torturer."

I took him at his word and tore into the papers at once. Most were letters from the two competing khajiiti courts, located in the desert and jungle respectively, from the past two months. Out of order they read like the fevered dream of an over achieving bureaucrat. Orders, counter orders, answers given not to the questions asked but to the questions the Manes wanted to be given all in the flowing script of various Khajiit scribes giving voice to a holy catman increasingly irate at himself. Both believed the other to be an imposter and expected imperial support in the event of war, or at the very least a formal declaration of their own legitimacy over their counterpart.

At some point Caius excused himself to go “stretch his legs”, leaving Benezia to glower over me as I worked. As he left I asked if he could spare a moment to find me a glass of water for my throat now dry as old leather. He assured me it would be his highest priority and vanished into the dark hall.

The papers were a mess, so I organized them to make sense of the labyrinth of conversations between unfamiliar people and places. Stacks set out before me by date, and then a different corner fold to signify the sender. My muse laid out before me, I could only wipe sleep from bleary eyes as my sense of time was in ruins and the party somehow felt like a distant memory.

Even more distant was the memory of sweet kisses from the girl across from me. The silence between us oppressed me and she felt all the farther, for her perfume was lost to the moldy stink of the cellar. The pity of her poor endowment aside, she was still the beauty I'd been enamored with.

I put down the scroll of incoherent ranting I’d been examining to meet her gaze. "How much of it was true, the things you told me tonight?"

"None of it, or near enough."

I nodded. "Well I meant everything I said."

"What do you mean?" No softness, her guard was up now.

"About your future. It was all true except for one part I left out," she rolled her eyes, the clever girl, but I continued anyway. "The thing you were thinking about — it's going to happen."

She snorted. "Caius may be humoring you but I can tell you have no clue what you're talking about. You certainly didn't see yourself here at the end of the night, did you Mr. Fate?"

"I can never see the small movements, only the longer arcs. I'm never wrong on those."

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It was a lie of course, and a petty one at that, but damned if my pride wasn't a bruised and bloodied victim in all of this. Her mouth twisted a bit sourer and I continued leafing through pages with the glow of some small grain of honor restored in my breast.

By flickering lamplight I read until my furrowed brows ached. The dull thrumming in my head made it hard to concentrate, but I was learning a great many things. For example, the curious compunction of Khajiit scribes to underline insults. Noting Caius was nowhere to be seen I licked my chapped lips and asked Benezia for a glass of water which she declined to provide, so I leaned over my work to shut out the world until suddenly I read something that stole the floor from under me.

It was a message from Governor Lucca describing his meeting with the ‘Fate Binder’ Berry Longfellow, who he requested the Blades seize for questioning. Lucca described me as a ‘fairly ordinary looking man’ followed by a short list of unnecessarily unflattering descriptors. But he closed with a warning: 'take precautions with the suspect, for he possesses a powerful artifact by the name of the Miser’s Mirror which I have heard many wild rumors and claims to the power of'.

My mind fell into a cold, ugly place that I had spent many years trying to forget. The page, suddenly heavy, fell from my grasp. “You never mentioned the mirror.”

Benezia looked up from something she was reading, a small mass-printed book that looked suspiciously like a romance novel. “Well it wasn’t in your bag. You still have it?”

“No.”

“Where is it?”

“The bottom of the ocean.”

“And how do you know that?.”

A cold numbness fell over me. “I threw it there many years ago. By myself.”

Her book clapped shut. “Not according to the governor. Supposing you're telling the truth now, why would you do such a thing?”

“It only caused problems…” I swallowed. “I believed it to be Daedric in nature.”

“So you admit to using it?”

“Yes but,” I paused, seeing my brother's pale face fall into the surf once again. I had to shake myself, realizing how dangerous it was to make any further admissions in front of this woman. “Not related to this Elsweyr matter in the least. I threw it into the ocean many, many years ago. I was still a child, a teenager I suppose.”

“But you would know how to handle it if you encountered it again.”

I had to admit that I did.

Benezia nodded, satisfied. She stormed out into the hall (there was no sashay to her step anymore) and called Caius back as I sat collecting my thoughts. When the old spymaster returned, glassy eyed now, I had to repeat everything back to him.

When I finished he nodded. “Consider your trip to the dungeon suspended for the moment — but I’ll need to check the veracity of your paperwork and get the approval of my superiors before we can decide our next move. Call me crazy, but I'm starting to believe you Berry. Perhaps fate did bring us together. Benezia — see that he gets some rest and then let’s regroup in the morning. The usual place."

Part of me feared ‘the usual place’ might mean dumping my body to the bottom of the Niben river, but I rose and followed Benezia all the same. She led me out of the cellar, and then down the dark halls of Marius’ estate once more. Finally she opened an unfamiliar door and gestured me inside, my mind tingling with a bizarre déjà vu. It was a guest room identical to the one I had been captured in.

Once inside, I turned to her. The male ego has a peculiar optimism when it comes to the other sex and I am no exception. But any hope for a goodnight kiss was met by the slammed door that damn near broke my nose. Not even a thank you.

Alone, I sought the solace of an empty bed, the crisp moonlit sheets cool against my skin. On a bedside table I found a shallow washing bowl which I quickly drained of water, quaffing it — soap residue and all — without complaint. Cold liquid sloshed within my gut, but even under the blankets my thoughts continued without end. It was too much for me to accept: the cruelness of my capture, the mystery of the twin Manes, and now the return of the damned mirror which had dominated my life for so long. A more serious man might have been plagued with doubts by it all, but in my state I was soon relieved by the unconcerned embrace of sleep.