scene from the middle-grade elder scrolls novel that lives in my head. introducing the Child, a bored spirit of mysterious provenance who claims to have forgotten his name, makes it a point of honor to know everyone's business, and seems to enjoy nothing more than following winterhold's resident clairvoyant around
my thought is that, rarely, a velothi child develops a particular knack for seeing and hearing the family spirits. traditionally, the duty of those so blessed is to study under an elder seer and learn to act as liason between the people of veloth and their ancestors. winterhold first-year pirer alethi starts seeing ghosts mid-semester and, unwilling to be sent away from the college, keeps it to himself; as a result, he soon finds himself caught between the grand plans of the living and the dangerous desires of the dead
He’s kneeling by the hearth of his dormitory cell, glowering with fear and defiance into the fire. He’s young and small. His eyes gleam red in the firelight. About him lay the relics of his ritual, the idols of his makeshift waiting-door: a scrap of cloth, a sprig of withered anther, a crude carving of a guar, all scattered and useless against whatever fiend or creature has heeded his call—
No, the fire agrees, not unkindly. Its voice is the hiss of hot air, the crackle of blackening paper, the dry sigh of ash. But it’s my door you opened. All thresholds in this place belong to me.
“Oh,” the prentice hears himself say, his voice small. He thinks. He chews his lip.
Then, his voice smaller still: “You’re not an evil spirit.”
The fire, the only light in the room—for a week now, the prentice has kept his sea-facing window shut tight—flares with something like amusement. The shadows on the far wall shiver and leap. Not to my knowledge.
“Can you answer my questions?”
It is what I am for.
The prentice hesitates.
Then he nods, short and sharp, like someone bereaved.
“What’s it like,” he asks, his face pinched and resolute, “to, uh—to die?”
I can hardly say. I’ve only done it the once. The fire flickers like a weak smile, unoffended. Happened so fast I nearly missed it.
The prentice stares at the fire. Then, his eyes widening, he recalls last week’s assembly in the College courtyard. An anniversary of sorts. Everyone had turned out. The Archmage, calm as old ice, reciting a memoriam in a dry and carrying drawl; the faculty lined behind him, some stern and sad, some fitting him for daggers with their eyes; the first-years at the back of the crowd stamping and shivering, their muttered protests clouding in the cold. They’d never met the Archmage’s predecessor—Saren, or Aren, or something like that. The prentice remembers tugging the sleeve of an older student, his face clenched like a fist above his scarf, to ask what had happened to him.
Died in an accident, the student had said, the snow settling like ash in his fair hair. Saved the Archmage. Saved us all.
And he’d smiled like an open coffin.
The prentice flicks a nervous ear at the memory.
“What is it like,” he asks hoarsely, his voice scarcely audible even to himself, “to—to be dead?”
What do the sermons say?
“That we will be safe.” The prentice, his face red and anxious in the firelight, leans closer. One of his braids starts to smolder. “And looked after.”
So may we in life, says the fire, if we live it well. What comes next is, well...immaterial.
“It is?”
The fire curls almost like a frown, and the flame eating the boy’s braid snuffs itself as if pinched. These are not idle questions, Pirer Alethi.
The prentice stares. He had not told the fire his name.
“I think—I think there’s something wrong with this place,” he says, swallowing. He tangles his hands in his lap, not looking at the fire; but its afterimage still drifts across his eyes, not unlike a man pacing back and forth across the floor. “It feels—I don’t know. Restless.”
Restless?
“The people here—”
Cold, says the fire, almost fondly. Busy. Indifferent. Wrapped up in their research, their grand and improbable plans. It clears its throat with a snap of smoldering twigs, then straightens with a self-important air. Adjusting to life on campus is often difficult, young Pirer, but I do believe you’ll find—
“No,” says Pirer Alethi, his dark hands fluttering like startled birds. “That’s—I, I mean, yes, it is, and they are, but that’s—that’s not what I meant.”
The fire quirks like an eyebrow. What did you mean?
“I meant,” says Pirer, “the people in the sea.”
In the corner of his eye, the afterburn of the fire stops pacing.
Then the fire goes out as if drowned. In the chill and heavy darkness of the room, flowing like water, a hand—warm and substantial—settles on Pirer’s shoulder.
Pirer, not breathing, turns to look at it.
It isn’t there.
Do not forget them, says Savos Aren, very gently. But best not look at them too long.
* * *
“Sea of Ghosts,” says Onmund, his smile somewhere between friendly and bleak. “That’s what we call it. Half the city’s down there.”
He’s hurrying a lost first-year to class: one of the Velothings lured by scholarship out of Windhelm, a wide-eyed, bat-eared boy no older than fifteen. His face is faintly familiar. There’s a dark smudge on his shoulder.
“Half—half the city?” puffs the boy, struggling to keep up. He’s several paces behind. The courtyard snow is higher than his knees.
“Maybe more,” Onmund calls over his shoulder. Then he snorts and crunches back to the boy, breaking a better trail through the morning drifts. “But that was a long time ago. Best leave the dead be, by my reckoning, and be about our business. Summoning atronachs before class, eh?”
The boy, with an anxious smile, chews the singed end of his braid. “What?”
“Atronachs.” Onmund, with an older brother’s thoughtlessness, brushes the ash from the first-year’s shoulder. He smiles his grim smile. “Gestor will love you. Not if you show up looking like a chimney-sweep, though, and not if you’re late—what are you looking at?”
The boy, his eyes wide and worried, does not answer. Onmund turns to follow his gaze, his eyes climbing up the wall, up the side of the Archmage’s tower, to the ant-sized figure standing at the top: the Archmage himself, his cloak snapping like a sail, staring out to sea.
“Oh, him,” says Onmund, staunchly unconcerned. “Never you mind. He does that all the time.”
