Talking to hallucinations was bad enough. Talking to himself, wholly lucid, was worse. Hlenil had always held by this, but when he tried to tell the guards that he had been having an interesting conversation with his wall and was in no condition to be unleashed on the public they – rudely – disagreed, telling him he had trespassed on their hospitality for long enough already. It was time to go.
Prison hadn't been so bad, apart from the food, and the guards, and the noises at night, and the smell. He couldn't see the ocean from inside, which was why, when he was let into the fresh air, Hlenil marched straight back out of it and into the fug of the cornerclub. Without any money it was a pointless endeavour. He had barely set foot inside before Geldis told him that he couldn't pay the rent with words, sera, and wasn't that a familiar sentiment?
But still. One last smell of greef, one last night in darkened lantern light, before the morning. Before the coastline. Before the horizon.
When he slept he heard the voices of all the people he had ever known telling him why it must be done.
Who wants you? Who needs you? Why delude yourself? You're old and tired, ash-sick and drug-addled, forgotten and unwanted. I'd tell you to go home but you don't have one, do you? Your era died two hundred years ago and you should have done the same.
This is Redoran Hlenil Hlaaron. This is you. All the bits you forgot, anyway, which come to think of it means you're talking to yourself, again. An awful habit. You seem to collect them, don't you?
Hlenil could still walk the paths of Vvardenfell, or at least, he could still feel the ash grazing the space between his toes, hear the netches groaning into bloated, blighted skies, smell sulphur and smoke and seasalt on the air. When he closed his eyes he saw the cantons stacked up against the clouds, as he rounded the last corner on the road to Vivec. Clouds which were like skin stretched across the sky: bruised and blighted, warm and bloody.
(Thunderstorms at the foot of Red Mountain were sanguineous, and Mother used to say: Almsivi bleeds for you, which made their terror worse.)
He could hear the words in the foyadas because they had words, too, words of their own devising, the veins and arteries of Red Mountain's heart. Pulsing words. Pounding words. Poetry words.
What would be the best way? To walk into the water and watch the world disappear around him, back into the ash? No – to jump. To watch it swallowed whole, with no time to think or regret, like smoke flowing out of the mountain, like the lanterns across the Ashlands extinguished all at once, and to fall into the darkness taking shape. That was the way.
He wouldn't look, he had told himself. He wouldn't look. He would go straight to the docks and get the first ship back to Skyrim – or High Rock, perhaps, for a change of scenery. Hammerfell. Yokuda, even. Away.
Of course he did look. Half asleep and all awake, he padded across the ash. Out of the Bulwark, out of Raven Rock, through the farms and blasted forests, down to the coast, to the pier where the boats from Khuul used to land, and he looked at Red Mountain. Stared until the wind scarred his eyes. Shook every time his heart beat against his chest. Manifold shadows held together by smokeflesh tendons, of Vvardenfell, of Morrowind, of Skyrim.
It would be cold in the water. The shock might do it first. A body forged in the heat of a volcano, under ice. Lungs blocked and stopped, frozen muscles, shattered viscera. His bones would turn to dust. To ash, maybe. He should be burnt and scattered across the lava fields, over Maar Gan, a two-hundred-year-old archaeological dig site, his childhood home.
Sometimes, when he climbed up high enough on the cliffs, when the wind and his mind were right, he could see the Redoran expeditions propping up shacks and tents along Azura's Coast. He pretended to see Maar Gan on the volcanic tundra, just as it always was, although Red Mountain was a different shape these days and the shell huts had been shredded apart by rock, buried beneath tonnes of pumice and lava. He could even pretend to see Vivec, which people told him they were thinking of rebuilding, although that was impossible. How could anyone rebuild a god?
All those studies, all those hours of dust, pressed in by books and parchment and questions, to learn that everything is nothing is everything and how to sleep forever dreaming and how to love Love
But how could he believe the world was nothing when the stone was there beneath his feet? When the distance waited ahead of him, when the sickness scratched fingernails into his bones?
He lowered his head, chin dug into his chest. Waves below, late morning stars above, and all the air the distant words between. Waves sluiced across the pier and his bare feet, rinsing the ash off in streams to the ocean.
Jump, and quickly. Get it over with. What use was waiting, after all? Theatrics couldn't change the past, except on the stage and inside people's heads. Words couldn't raise the Sea of Ghosts and send it washing across Vvardenfell, uncovering lost cities and carrying him home. Not any more. Yes, he would jump.
But he was still so scared.
The water crashed and went silent.
Great grey nothing, ash clouds exploding downwards, the mountains waiting beneath the ocean. How high they were, how far they went. Coral ruins. Water in his ears and a silence so empty he felt it pushing up against his heart
and he believed in nothing
And in a last little moment a hand reached out, stroked the underside of the water and prayed at the beginning of a nothing to a god who wasn't there.
(teach me Vivec teach me how to breathe underwater teach me how to talk with dreughs teach me how to tease the waves from the spectrum and find your incalculable universes in the transcendental water so that we can live always in your presence Vehk-and-Vehk do you love your people do you Love your people will you bring us home with you across the last existence please don't forget us when you dream we love you love you love you praise ALMSIVI always, always, always
oh ayem ae sehti ae vehk oh gods please I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home)
'Drowned himself. Found him off the coast, washed up near the Earth Stone.'
'Told you we should've kept an eye on him.'
'We can't spare mer to run around babysitting refugees, not with those thrice-damned ashspawn all over the place.'
'He was Redoran, wasn't he? Well, burn the body, chuck his ashes in the temple and maybe we can finish early. Veleth hasn't found the emberbrand yet and there's a bottle with my name on it.'
