J'henq - hates these twins ii
J’henq could see their silhouettes at the top of the stairs, watching him with their tails twitching in eerie unison. The sunlight of Stros M’Kai halted in an abrupt line, beyond which lay dust and cobwebs and almost certainly painful groaning grasping eating death. He did not want to go. He was no adventurer and certainly no tomb robber.
Ssyzahi disagreed with J’henq, and Qsyzhai agreed with Ssyzahi, and together they were just So Sure that J’henq was the man for this job. They’d bathed him, clothed him, given him a stout leather jerkin and a fine pair of daggers and a new roll of picks. They told him there were jewels at the bottom of the tomb. They watched with enigmatic smiles when he had insisted that someone else, someone luckier, someone braver should be their thief. They offered him forty percent of the profit. He refused. They told him they were going to wear his pelt if he refused again. In that case, gentlemen, this one thinks daylight is burning, and we should make for the tomb.
They were picking on poor fallen J’henq, he mused, as he wiggled and squirmed through a hole the size of a watermelon. They’d been showing up all over Stros M’Kai, following him around, making their creepy presence known. He saw them in the tanner’s shop, slowly carving apart skins. He saw them in the blacksmith’s, testing the points of wavy krisses with their paws, and licking the bright red drops away. He saw them in the tavern, sipping on blood red wine. He saw them in his dreams, entwined into a monster with two heads, beckoning him with a curved finger and a sensuous, sussurating voice.
It had always been easier to crawl and creep than to fight for the lithe khajiit. He pressed himself into corners, covered himself with grave dust, and crept bootless on soundless footpads to evade the creaking long-dead guardians, who shuffled endlessly, mindlessly unaware that their eons of servitude were about to end in failure. He flicked open vaults and keyholes with the barest hint of pressure, hardly even disturbing the dust that had settled onto the doors. He leapt over pits, oiled and unhinged claws set to claim the unwary. He bitched to himself unceasingly about his terrible, terrible luck as he opened the carved, runed mausoleum at the heart of this awful place.
Inside, all was a-glitter with wealth. J’henq’s head swam as he rubbed at his dusty eyes, unable to comprehend the mountain of ancient gold and silver and polished gleaming gems the size of robin’s eggs. Praises to the gods above and below. Praises to the Princes. Praises to the Dark Lady. Praises to Sithis the Father. J’henq thrust a paw into the center of the pile.
He came away with only a curious box made of carved marble, unadorned and unremarkable. Its lid jostled about as he examined it for traps - but, finding nothing, the curious cat slid the box lid off. He dropped it, and the box. They shattered. He scrambled backwards on his paws, scrabbling for purchase on the dusty tiles, slamming into the walls of the mausoleum in his haste to escape.
Above, J’henq burst into the sunlight, sobbing and gibbering, bleeding from a dozen claw slashes and near-miss arrow wounds, running as fast as he could over the dunes toward Stros M’Kai. Behind him trailed the ghost, tatters and ruins and bones and lovely pallid flesh, whispering in an ancient tongue meant only for the dead or the mad.
Behind them both, tails twitching in eerie unison, trailed the twins.