August 12th: Free Day
for @tes-summer-fest. Consider this a combination of Beloved, Mortal, & Profane prompts.
At the very end of time, two dwarves reunite. Follows the events of A Thesis: On Twelve Tones.
Thanks to @ervona for all her help with this.
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6E 2521, Sun's Dawn
Bthemetz, formerly, Esteemed Dwemer Architect, since turned Dashing Exile and Roguish Renegade – or at least, that was how she told it, when she was in a good mood – was enjoying the cloud-top view on the upper decks of her very own steam-powered airship – en route somewhere between the Sunk Halls of Colossus and the Anequinan Archipelago, she would have estimated – when she received the letter that turned her circuits inside out.
It arrived, magnificently, via bird. One who announced its triumphant arrival by pecking at her cranial plates.
Fine, the absurdity of it aside – it was an old-fashioned yet not entirely obsolete means of delivery, still common enough amongst the islanders north of the Niben Sea. Really though, what would they want with her, though? She stayed well clear of anything close to New Dwemereth. And why not a courier, or a tonal telegraph, or a direct apparition using the teleportation matrix, for that matter? This was before the painfully detailed instructions on what exactly to do in case the letter was not delivered to its intended recipient – which was herself, it turned out, someone had written this for her – were addressed. This crow whisperer and sendee had outlined no less than nine sub-divided steps on how the letter might be returned to Ghourrock Isle (which Bthemetz presumed was some far-flung Orcish settlement known for their overly familiar corvid population), or, if not possible, how to dispose of the letter (quite vigorously – this person presumed the recipient had some highly concentrated acid to hand) and what precisely to do with the bird that had been entrusted to deliver it (which had some quite peculiar care requirements, it turned out).
The first warning sign was that these same instructions were repeated on the reverse in four different dialects of Aldmeris, ranging from antiquated to simply baffling. Who on Tamriel was still writing in High Chimeris of all things?
(A Dwemer)
Bthemetz didn't particularly want to think about that – because if this message hadn’t slipped out from a scamp at the back-end of Oblivion (which Bthemetz wasn’t entirely discounting, she still kept a few contacts with troublemakers in the forbidden regions), it was almost definitely from another Dwemer.
(A very old Dwemer)
One who had refused to reckon with the changing state of reality since The Reappearance. One, whom, from the choice of and number of languages, was likely both a powerful and exceedingly well-educated individual, most likely from Western Morrowind or Vvardenfell – Bzanthzel or even Vvardenfell-Khoram, knowing her luck – appeared well-versed in both local politics and international affairs during the height of the First Council –
(A very old, very powerful Dwemer, yet to reappear–)
Her stomach was sinking already.
(But why would they send a bird?)
She unsealed the letter.
Fourteen pages. Careful Dwemeris, double-sided, black ink. Encoded three times over. She almost shut down, seeing it all. The exact set of ciphers she had difficulty recalling, it had been so long since she sat on the Architects Committee, but the codes themselves – unmistakable.
And oh! Oh so personal – it came flooding back, they’d used this set exclusively in their own correspondence, hadn't they? Bthemetz had all but inscribed these old codes over her stilled, dead heart and then burned them in there, burned them, along with the broken tea sets and the stolen bedsheets and the careful hands braiding her hair and the casual blasphemy and the principles of Anuic Disruption they had co-authored and their careful hands, again –
She couldn’t finish that thought. It would bury her.
She went back to the delivery instructions. Chose a language both of them had contempt for. That would be safe. Bthemetz couldn't even read High Nordic – she did not share the sender's gift for languages, and had torn their tongue out merely learning to speak Dwemeris improperly, let alone anything as useless as High Nordic, which was three millennia dead. She lurched forward, which made the bird – who she discovered was a crow named Gnorgi, could not eat carrots, and had since decided the piping of her external combustion engine was a very comfortable perch – very upset with her. Had their handwriting always been this meticulous? So carefully spaced? She remembered it being messier. She tried to picture it messier.
She tore open the letter.
Bthemetz, I scarcely know how to begin.
She tore herself away.
She sat down. Stood up. Walked in a circle three times. Her legs did not fold beneath her and her body did not break and the motor engine where her heart should have been did not begin to roar and scream and hiss. The crow, Gnorgi, looked at her curiously. She went back to the letter. Rifled through the pages. Tore through them, at random, because she definitely wasn't trying to find something, anything, any kind of sign or direct confirmation, telling her this wasn’t exactly what it felt like –
—and I find myself so overwhelmed. The world has moved on without me. So many people I treasured are long dead. I could not begin to list what I mourn, who I mourn. My life's work and purpose, stolen, defaced, ridiculed. I am a parable for children, Bthemetz. 'Beware, the Dwemer, defeated by their own hubris! Hoisted by their own cutting bells!' And yet, for all their mockery, I am struck by the way we loom in those tales like giants while calling us ‘dwarves’. Menacing, unfathomable, foreign ‘dwarves’. How much we frightened them, Bthemetz! They coveted everything we had as much as they wanted to burn it. They built empires out of our ashes as soon as they turned our names into a curse. They sought to comprehend our ‘magics’ as distant ancients, yet none of them would dare imagine what it was like to be alive at that time, after war and occupation and constant patrols around our city borders, surrounded by god-fearing men and mer who all wanted to slit our throats. Did they realise that we raced towards discovery for fear that it would be seized from us again? I cannot think too long on this, for the thought burns inside of me like dragonfire, and I become torn with anger. I would think of you often, then, as I read these ‘Tales’ the local witch lent me. About what you lost. What you endured and what you still, now, endure. I don't think I grasped it then - how could I possibly have? I understand something of loss, but you returned to Tamriel thousands of years after your death, to broken poems and pottery shards and a world that had moved on. And you looked at us, at our world, and decided immediately that it would be yours. That you were going to live again, live anew. How did you even manage it? How could you bear it? How on earth could you decide to live, so easily? I loved you for your courage, amongst your many other admirable qualities, but knowing what I do now, I don't think I loved you enough for it. I would be lucky to have even half as much—
Bthemetz folded the page crisply in half. She clutched her right wrist. Her right wrist contained a device that could incinerate paper and parchment in a matter of seconds. The page was folded crisply in half, and was not crumpled on the floor. She clutched her right wrist.
(She was back)
Years. Years of hopeless searching – from Morrowind to Elsweyr, from Tamriel to Akavir to beyond, to the darkest corners of Oblivion and the Void beyond it, before she had to give up, give up and move on, or else consume herself utterly in the maddening glimpses of what she had held so dear. Years. And Bthemetz had never once entertained the thought that Kagrenac would be the one to find her.
She did not know what to do with herself. She clutched her right wrist.
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6E 2521, Rain's Hand
They meet again, after so long, on the last island before Atmora. They wander out to northernmost cliffs, Kagrenac and Bthemetz, two old dwarves near the end of time, for a short walk before the rains come.
The world they know has vanished: gods have come and gone, cities have sunken beneath new oceans, and magic has almost vanished – now the sole purview of White-Gold tower, squabbled over by Imperial wizards and witch-pirates who traded in rare spells. Wrothgar is not an ancient mountain range that houses a great history of Orcish-Dwemeri relations, but a string of storm-swept isles where wreck-divers and scrap-riggers cobble together something skyworthy from whatever washes up from the Sea of Ghosts.
Kagrenac tells Bthemetz of this. Of Clan Marog and the Isle of Ghourrock. Of Grasha, a teenage crab-catcher who found her washed up dead in a cave while looking for lichens, and Witch-Wife Rikka, a former Weather-Witch who stitched her wounds and tended to her after she woke up, alive again, without explanation. Spin-Sister Shufti, who spins tales as much as she did Echatere yarn and brings fresh gossip with over-salted clam stew. Chief Moraga, a rugged old Ship-Rigger from the pirate clans, now settled down and more than happy to help Kagrenac string together an instrument from salvage, who finds it greatly amusing that they enjoy bawdy old Wrothgaran love songs quite so much. The rest, who herd goats and spin wool and while they wait for the clan-ships to return from the hunt. Of how life was both tedious and tightly-woven.
Bthemetz asks more on that than anything else. Was it a home? Was it a coffin, slowly rotting? Both, replied Kagrenac. Are you content out here? Yes. Oh, very much yes. Surprisingly, yes. Perhaps in another life, the winds would have kept her here. Bthemetz does not say much, after this, for a long time. Perhaps they are lying.
“Of what, precisely? Grey cliffs and 90% chance of rain?” She pauses. “The shipwreck engineers are quite resourceful – I do admit that much–”
“Ah. I see,” says Kagrenac. There is a slither of a smile, but not unkind. “You're envious.”
“Oh, you'd be bored beyond your greatest imagination, Bthemetz. Bouncing off the walls.”
Bthemetz scoffs. It is strange for Kagrenac to see her, a mess of wires and melted-down brass, ill-fitting parts cobbled together, make the exact same expressive gestures as she did as the Brass Architect, a living work of art.
“And yet, the fine company of Chief Moraga gra-Marug does not bore you, does it Kagrenac?”
Kagrenac offers a hint of a smile. It is a sad one. Not once has Bthemetz called them 'Rena', 'Renya', 'Kagrena', or anything but their full name since they began speaking.
“I am quite well acquainted,” Kagrenac adds. “With her witch and wife, Rikka, as well.”
Bthemetz throws her head back and laughs.
“Oh, you have been busy. What a productive fifteen months.”
“I was too ill to leave my bed for a great number of them, frankly,” Kagrenac says. “I didn't know how to send a message off the island before the lunar new year.”
Bthemetz halts.
“Is that an apology, Kagrenac?”
“An explanation.” She almost knits her hands together, as a girl might, before stopping herself. They rest awkwardly at her sides. “I was also... quite upset.”
Bthemetz looks out to the horizon. The sun is lingering at its edge.
“Are you still, in your own words, quite upset?”
Kagrenac shakes her head. “Dwemereth, as we knew it, is gone. It seems senseless to still seethe over a betrayal to what doesn't exist.”
“I asked how you feel. Not how you ought to feel.”
Kagrenac crumples her brow.
“I – I don’t know if I follow.”
“It has been a year. You cannot so easily bat away sheer rage with a puff of logic.” Bthemetz says. “Surely you know this. You spent almost your whole life fueled by it. You are perhaps the most resentful person I know. I almost wonder how you can even stand to speak to me.”
Kagrenac closes their eyes. Their hands still. Their takes a step forward. Their voice lowers.
“Would you feel better, Bthemetz, if I openly despised you?”
“It would feel more familiar.”
They step away.
“For that, I am sorry.”
Something clenches.
“I hurt you.” said Bthemetz. “Terribly.”
“I want to move past that.”
“I betrayed our people. Our home. I took our dearest secret and delivered it straight in to the hands of our worst enemies. I started the damned war–”
“I know,” they say, gravely. “Bthemetz, I have always known. I stand by my previous statement.”
Bthemetz stops. She flings her arms outwards.
“You tried to kill me!”
“I know.”
It is soft and it is tense and it is mournful. The way she says it. Almost a whisper.
“How.” There's rattling. Bthemetz's arms begin to shake. “I don't understand – I simply do not understand how you can–”
She seizes up. The lights flicker off and on.
“Bthemetz?”
There's a moment where nothing is said, and all that is heard is the rumbling of the ocean, the crashing of the waves. A bird cries in the distance. A light switches on suddenly.
The next words are cut with gritted teeth.
“I – I apologise,” says Bthemetz. “This iteration,” she gestures to her brass form, “it has its limitations. As you can very well see.”
“Would you rather I visit your realm?”
“No. No, I would rather you not.” She sighs. “I mean, not to be discourteous–”
“It is fine. No explanation is required.” Kagrenac says. “And we do not need to have all of this conversation now.”
Bthemetz looks at her carefully.
“You're sincere about this, aren't you?”
Kagrenac nods.
They continue walking as the cliffs give way to the coast. They climb their way down to the shore, rough rock and crashing waves, and here, at the edge of a world neither of them really understand, Bthemetz speaks again.
“You asked me how I could bear it.”
Kagrenac turns. The wind pulls sharply at the winter shawl they have borrowed from Shufti, at the braids Rikka had re-beaded only four nights before. Something in them wants to come loose.
“How I could bear...” Bthemetz pauses. “Living in a world that has left me behind, I believe you said. Broken poetry, something to that dramatic effect. I think, well—” and there's her laugh that twinkles and sounds like the smile Kagrenac could not touch, devastating to the ears, “—you still idealise her, a bit, don’t you? The Radical Rabble-Rouser that I was. The little priest who tried to set herself and The Priesthood ablaze in the fires of Revolution.”
It is such a Bthemetzian twist of rhetoric. A glib reference to her hated past, an unspoken accusation, and a gesture that circled entirely around the point, and yet Kagrenac can only respond as they always have:
“How could I not? I grew up on tales of you.”
Bthemetz, who has heard this a thousand times before, laughs.
“I think the dishonest answer would be that I moved on and became an Architect so readily because I hated my old life. It's half-true, but...”
She trails off. She's rattling in the wind. Kagrenac has to ask her, before it blows either of them away.
“What of the honest answer?”
Bthemetz does not and cannot smile. There's a metal mask bolted on in place of where a face sits. Kagrenac does not see the knowing smile in the breath where an answer should be, that quick uptick of her lips that liked to say things such as: there is so much pain in the world you don't even know. Kagrenac does not see anything in Bthemetz before she gives her answer.
“I had you, of course.”
It shouldn't have felt like a knife to the heart. To hear her say that.
“And when you disappeared,” continues Bthemetz. “When all of you disappeared. And I was alone. That was when I couldn't bear it. I... I couldn't bear it.”
“I am sorry,” they say softly.
The wind begins to roar. The seas surge inwards. The cold is sharp in the air. Kagrenac realises, despite themselves, that they would move the mountains to the stars to close the distance between them at that moment. That they would remake time and the world itself to lessen her pain, if they had such a power. The unspeakable things they would do, yet again, for Bthemetz! Those very same things that had torn them and the world apart. As if they had learned nothing at all from their utter obliteration. Where had that reckless impulse, to stand equal to the gods, left them, now? Here, thousands of years and miles away from her home, from the woman she called home, whose heart she so dearly wanted to cradle? A lone dwarf at the end of the world without choir or clan or acolytes or instruments or the echoes of the Twelve Tones they had once devoted their life to. Incapable of changing the course of their lives, held at the mercy of the whims of the winds and the tides, like any other that walk this soil. Like any mortal soul.
It is bitter, it is such a bitter thing, to reckon with.
It is all they can offer.