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madam-whim · 9 months

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A Visit Long Overdue

Martin breathed a sigh of relief as the Chapel of Arkay came into view, glad to have found his destination after such a short time. Of course, a building of that size was hard to overlook, towering over the houses surrounding it, but finding it it almost total darkness had been a challenge nonetheless. He didn’t dare use a lantern to light his path, had even foregone the use of a magelight, because as easily extinguished as it was, it shone brightly and attracted attention when there was no other source of light around. And while Martin certainly wasn’t planning anything nefarious, he also could not risk running into the city guard – not with where he was going.

It was probably not the brightest idea he’d ever had, leaving the safety of Castle Cheydinhal behind and sneaking past the guards at the gate, but then again, he had his reasons. Touring the entirety of Cyrodiil was difficult enough as it was, with the way he no longer felt safe in an unfamiliar environment. Cheydinhal was no exception, and he had nearly lost his mind with worry when he’d woken in the middle of the night in what he had believed to be a secure set of rooms, only to find his wife gone, her side of the bed cold and empty. At first he’d believed that someone, somehow, had managed to take her away, because Arri rarely left his side these days, not willingly at least, and Martin preferred it that way. They had been separated for long enough, thinking they would never see each other again, and now, not knowing where the other was was often enough to send either of them into a panic. No, Arri would never have left without a good reason.

Martin had come quite close to waking the entire castle to help look for his wife – something he could easily have done, after all, he was an Emperor whose Empress had gone missing – but Baurus had been there, and the young Blade had managed to find what Martin had overlooked in his frightened state. It turned out that Arri really had left of her own volition. She’d wedged one of the knives she always carried between their bedroom window and its frame, thus preventing it from closing fully and indicating that she had not only left that way, but also planned on returning.

“Does she have anyone in Cheydinhal?” Baurus had asked then. “Anyone that she knows, but wouldn’t want us to meet?”

That was how it had all become clear to Martin, and how he found himself near the Chapel of Arkay, looking for the abandoned house he knew to be nearby. Because while Arri had nobody left in Cheydinhal now, there had once been a family, and when Baurus had asked his question, Martin had instantly known where his wife must have gone, and he’d known he had to find her at once.

Talking his friend out of accompanying him into the city had been difficult, but he had convinced him in the end, stating that someone needed to be around and provide a cover, should it take him until morning to bring Arri back. He couldn’t possibly know how long it would take him to find his wife, and while he assumed her to be safe and unharmed physically, he didn’t know what state he’d find her in.

Locating the abandoned house itself wasn’t as difficult as Martin had initially feared. He had never been to Cheydinhal before now, but Arri had described the place to him, and even in the dark it was easy enough to locate, a perpetual thorn in the side of Arkay’s faithful, what with all the rumors floating around. Some even claimed that ‘Legend of Krately House’ had been written with this very house in mind, one of the few things associated with her past that could really make Arri laugh, likely because she knew how that particular rumor had come about. And so, Martin soon found the one building that had its door and windows nailed shut, climbing over the low wall separating the property from the street. For such a big city, it was almost eerily quiet even with it being the middle of the night, and he did not want to risk the hinges of a gate that hadn’t been in use for decades attracting anyone’s attention. He hadn’t met more than a handful of guards and two or three stumbling drunks on his way through the city, none of them having noticed him, and he intended to keep it that way.

He hesitated for a moment before summoning the weakest magelight he’d ever cast, barely enough to help him see. A guard walking by at an inopportune moment and noticing it would certainly lead to questions, and Martin didn’t care to answer them. Still, he did need to find out how Arri had entered the house. Following in her footsteps would be the easiest way in for him, too, he knew. It would cause the least amount of noise, and that was what he was aiming for, because while Arri was used to being stealthy and had arguably been trained by the best, Martin was certainly not.

His first instinct was to check the well. Arri had told him about that entrance once, back at Cloud Ruler Temple, when they’d been little more than two lost people confiding in each other. However, he found the well sealed tight, with nothing indicating that Arri had undertaken the effort of opening it back up. It would have made too much noise for her taste, Martin assumed, and so he went around the house looking for any signs she might have left behind. He found the window she’d gone through just a short time later, near the back of the house, where one would have to be actively looking to notice something was amiss. She had apparently done nothing more than to remove some of the boards that had been used to seal the window and left them hidden in the high grass. That had been enough for her to get in, and even though Martin wasn’t nearly as agile as she was, he managed to climb into the building the same way after removing one more piece of wood. He did have to hide around the corner of the house for a brief moment when he spotted the glow of a guard’s torch coming closer than he liked, but once he made it through the window, he knew he was safe from prying eyes.

Still, the hardest part was yet to come, and all he had to go on was what Arri had told him. If anything had changed in the past twenty or so years since she’d last been here, he would have to handle it on his own until he found his wife. But he was not deterred by that thought – not when there was a chance his wife needed him close.

Now that it was safe to do so, he increased the strength of his magelight, letting it guide him down into the basement, where Arri had said the door to the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary was hidden. Sure enough, he found it right away – a sense of wrongness that he couldn’t even begin to describe settled over him once he got closer to it. Not that he needed it to find the entrance, really; with the Sanctuary abandoned and its last inhabitant, a woman named Arquen, dead by Arri’s own hand, there had been no one to ensure it remained hidden. It was quite likely that the only reason it hadn’t been discovered by the guard and subsequently walled off was that the house had been given a wide berth even when the Sanctuary had still been in use. Nobody had entered this place in two decades, at least not until Arri had come through.

She had even made sure to close the door behind her, Martin saw now, the rather grotesque skull on the accursed thing almost seeming to stare at him as he came closer. It had been smart of her to close it just in case she had been followed, and yet Martin was not looking forward to having the door speak to him. He was prepared for it, of course, but he still nearly jumped when the whispered question came, just as menacing as Arri had described it.

“What is the color of night?” it asked.

Martin nearly sighed in relief, ignoring the sense of dread that would certainly have kept him away if it weren’t for Arri. The passphrase was still the same, which meant he would be able to reach his wife without having to solve whatever riddle the entity within the door have him. He took a deep breath.

“Sanguine, my brother.”

The door opened, and Martin stepped inside a place that even during his darkest times, he never thought he’d ever set foot in.

He found Arri kneeling on the ground in what he assumed had once been the main hall of the sanctuary, kneeling between two Argonian skeletons. The Shadowscales, then, Martin thought. As he stepped closer, he realized Arri was talking to them, murmuring too low for him to understand. The words weren’t for him to hear, anyway, and so he stayed some distance away, giving her the time she needed.

She only noticed his presence when she stood back up, shaking the stiffness out of her legs. Martin didn’t know how long she had been sitting here, but it had to have been quite some time. When she turned to face him, her eyes were red-rimmed and there were remnants of tears still visible on her face, but she seemed clear-headed, and almost relieved, if that was possible in such a situation.

“I hoped you’d just sleep through the night and you wouldn’t even notice I was gone at all,” she greeted him, a lopsided smile on her face. Her voice was somewhat shaky, still, but nowhere near as bad as Martin had feared.

“I’m afraid I don’t sleep well without you,” he sighed, walking towards her and extending his arms so she could lean into his embrace. “But nobody except Baurus knows we’re gone at all, and we have some hours until sunrise. You could stay a while longer, if you need to.”

“That’s good,” Arri muttered, “but I do think I’m done. I had a lot to say to these two, so I talked to them last.” She paused, taking a deep breath, and Martin could almost feel the way she stepped from the past back into the now. She gave him a strange look, then. “How did you even get in here?”

“The same way you did, through back right window and then the door.”

“You remembered the passphrase?”

“That one’s hard to forget, for me,” Martin replied with a laugh, and Arri blinked at him for a moment before her lips twitched into the smallest of smiles.

“Didn’t even think about it like that,” she admitted. “I am sorry you had to come after me, though. I just … I never got to say goodbye, not really, so I had to come. Didn’t mean to drag you into it.”

“I understand, my love,” Martin said. “No need for apologies. I’d have done the same thing, most likely.”

Arri wrapped her arms around him the way she always did when she needed him to ground her. “It still doesn’t feel like enough. I couldn’t bring myself to come back here for so long, and now … There’s barely anything left of them. They were my siblings, Martin, the Shadowscales most of all,” she nodded at the two skeletons, “trained by the same man I was, and I failed both them and him.”

Martin shook his head. “From what I understand of how the Dark Brotherhood works, you didn’t fail anyone, not your mentor and not your siblings. Not until you left it all behind.”

“And murdered Arquen.”

“Which I cannot imagine anyone holding against you, given the circumstances. You didn’t fail anyone so much as they failed you. Nobody in this sanctuary died because of mistakes you made. They made them all on their own, and you bore the consequences. I know it doesn’t feel like that, and it likely never will, but I need you to understand that none of this was ever your fault. You were barely more than a child, and you couldn’t have done any more than you did.”

They were both silent after that, at least for a little while. Martin watched Arri turn in his arms to stare down at the bones for a bit longer, offering whatever silent support he could while she stood there, sniffling quietly, remembering long-dead people who’d loved and protected her when nobody else had.

“Would you like to bury them?” he asked after a while, gently squeezing Arri’s hand.

She only shook her head at the suggestion. “I don’t think I do. I believe they are exactly where they would want to be, at home with their family. Gods, I don’t even think they minded the way they died. But ...”

“But?”

“I’d like to go back to Applewatch one day,” she said softly. “To get Lucien and bring him back here. I know he wasn’t a good man, not at all, but I’m alive today because of him, and I owe it to him to get him back home. He should be with Ocheeva and Teinaava, he was their father in all but blood. And Vicente, well, I never really did find out if they were together or not, but … they should rest in the same place at least.”

“I think we can arrange that,” Martin smiled. “After all, digging up some old bones is hardly the most diffcult thing we’ve accomplished. It might take some planning, but we will figure something out.”

“We always do,” Arri said resolutely, dragging a hand across her face to rid herself of the last of her tears. Martin always wondered how she did it – to let her emotions out, only to rein them back in at a moment’s notice. It all came down to practice, she said, though she suspected that some small part of it was, perhaps, left over from her time as Sheogorath.

“We should get back to the castle before anyone notices we’re gone,” she decided. “How did you even get out? Because I know it wasn’t the same way I did.”

Martin suppressed a laugh, because he couldn’t see himself climbing out of a window either. “Servant’s entrance. Do not ask me how, but Baurus always knows where those are. We can go back in that way, no need for you to scale the castle wall.”

Arri nodded. “Let’s get going, then. Because … please don’t take this the wrong way, Martin, but seeing you here just feels … off, like you don’t belong. And neither do I, not anymore. I think I’ve gone soft.”

“I rather think you always were,” Martin answered, “you just couldn’t allow yourself to be, but that’s over now. We will get your mentor to put your mind at ease, and then neither of us will ever need to come back here. How does that sound?”

“Like a really good idea,” Arri answered, and then she took his hand and led him out of the sanctuary, out of her own past and back to the life they’d built together.

@tes-summer-fest Day 4: Sanctuary

#tesfest23 #my writing #oblivion #oc: arri #martin septim #dark brotherhood #lucien lachance #ocheeva #teinaava #timeline what timeline #martin lives au #basically to fit my hok's timeline the dark brotherhood questline happens ~20 years before the mq #past character death

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