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everybodyknows-everybodydies · 7 months

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The site had just been marked as a passing reference in one of the numerous incomplete texts in Shalidor’s own hand (not always legible, as the great mage—and she has very tactfully not said this aloud to Urag—had atrocious penmanship), which is why she hadn’t come expecting much the first time. Most of the places mentioned in Shalidor’s notes either no longer exist or are long since emptied, by age or by adventurers who don’t know anything about good conservation technique and insist on leaving their own journals all over the place with barely a page or two filled. She imagines whoever is bookbinding for these adventurers must run a surprisingly lucrative business.

This particular site, being potentially important (please let it be important), has earned a second visit after an impassioned dual presentation that the Archmage politely listened to about a nonsequential quarter of between extended bouts of contemplating the steam from his tea, should one be inclined to a generous estimate.

“This is it, then?” Tolfdir huffs out a breath and lowers his pack to the ground in a relatively dry patch, peering with interest at the mostly-buried structure before them. “I do so love a good excavation, it must be said. How did you get in the first time?”

“Well—” Kharish tests the dirt with the toe of her boot. Not too muddy, under the snow, as long as they’re careful. “Took some digging.” She drops into a crouch, tilts her head, squints. She’d covered up the entrance when she’d left last time to try to keep the interior as undisturbed as possible, not expecting to have to uncover it again herself. “Over there, I think—I couldn’t get to the door, but something knocked a hole in there that did drop down into what looked like the main entry passage.”

“Fascinating,” says Tolfdir, clapping his hands together. “Shall we?”

She goes first, because it’s more of a drop than she remembered and she does not want to know what happens to her career trajectory if he breaks an ankle. A smattering of dislodged dust and dirt dribbles from the lip of the hole in the ceiling when she looks up, arms held out and knees braced. “Rea—ack.” His satchel smacks into her temple and she blinks a brief burst of stars out of her eyes. He is unexpectedly sturdy. Maybe she could have let him go first after all.

“Thank you,” he says cheerfully, righting himself and starting down the dark hall, magelight already hovering over his shoulder. “They don’t put much padding on these floors, do they? Notes for future tomb-builders, let’s say.”

Kharish ducks under a low-hanging cobweb. “Future, er… I thought you said these kinds of tombs weren’t still being built?”

“Not at all,” Tolfdir pauses to inspect a relief, nose nearly against the stone. “But wouldn’t it be nice if they were? The use of a hall of the dead has been much more prevalent than a tomb barrow for—oh, ages now.” He seems pleased by whatever he needed to sniff from the wall and steps back again, brushing off his hands. “Eras, even! Why, I should tell you, it’s gone through several renovations of course, but the Windhelm hall of the dead, for example, is quite the historical treat. In fact, records dating back to the second era seem to indicate—”

She remembers abruptly that Urag specifically warned her, stressing the timeframe of once they’d arrived, not to ask Tolfdir about tombs. Or their architecture. You’ll never get him to stop, he’d said seriously, rubbing at the bridge of his nose the way he does when he’s been wearing his glasses too long, and you can’t afford distraction in there because we may not get another chance at this one. Do not let him talk about the tombs.

“What do you know about Ulfsild?” she interrupts—which is all she can think of right now, a little jittery, with the mental note to ask him again about the Windhelm hall of the dead on the way back to Winterhold to make up for the interruption—and hesitates a moment to slide an ajar coffin lid closed as gently as she can.

Tolfdir hums thoughtfully. She hadn’t expected it to work so well, but he says, “Oh, no more than the average scholar, I suppose. Not quite more than the name. It’s rather exciting, isn’t it? Another thing to love about these old places; every one holds some grand new discovery that could alter our understanding of the world as we know it.” He adjusts the strap of his satchel on his shoulder and continues, gesturing for her to take the lead now that he’s done studying the bas-relief. “It didn’t sound like you and Urag had gotten very far in the journal transcription; had you come across anything of note yet?”

It’s always better to be cautious about things that aren’t certain—if she were to allow herself to be a little reductive, she would say that history is nothing but context, and an asyndetic text, even a primary source, requires a degree of speculation that, applied too liberally, can often be worse than useless. And it’s not really quite her field anyway: she repairs the books. What’s inside, she’s still discovering, is often more questions than answers. “It’s a possibility,” Kharish acknowledges finally. There’s a narrow stairway; she turns sideways, awkward, to descend. “The back two-thirds looked much more esoteric, but the first section appeared to be fairly detailed notes on the construction of Eyevea. From what I saw of the relevant entries, her discussion suggested more of a—technical familiarity—than Urag says is typically believed she would have had.”

“I see! Yes, I believe I recall he told me their separation occurred during the whole Eyevea ordeal. Very sad, isn’t it?” he muses. “Scholars of the same discipline should never get too involved. Think how many good academic arguments would be discouraged if the participants risked upending their home lives!”

“Well, I don’t know about that; being able to articulate a distinction between your home life and your academic life should be a priority if you’re really invested in the preservation of both aspects of the relationship, but even so, incompatible personalities will probably always find something to—hang on, this one,” she cuts herself off, stopping before an arch marked with a stylized owl and going for her little notebook. The hollow eyes glare down at her. She squints back at them and then compares it to the unflattering scribble in her notes. “Yes. This one.”

“Ah!” Tolfdir peers up at it, redirecting his magelight to shift the shadows. A fistful of dust from overhead smatters into his hair. Kharish reaches up absently to ruffle the debris out of her own hair, waiting. The faint dust cloud that results drifts downward, glittering faintly in the magelight, and dissipates. “The owl of Jhunal—not as popular as Kyne’s hawk, as bird imagery goes, but no less significant for it. Did you know, when associated with a specific mage, the configuration of the feathers is thought to represent the school the mage specialized in—”

Scrambling for something to write with in her bag, she shakes her notebook to a fresh page. “Wait, wait, wait—really? Which feathers? What would this one represent?”

“Hmm,” he says, thoughtful. And then, again, “Hmm.” He puts a hand to his chin, gesturing with the other to move the magelight once more. “I can’t say it looks to be one of the established schools of magic. The barring on the tail is quite destruction, but the chiselwork across the shoulders more closely resembles the iconography for alteration. And the head! Difficult to make out, but it doesn’t look right at all. You know, I do wish we’d thought to bring a stepping-stool.”

She pauses, staring at the owl. If it were a flat carving they could take a rubbing and look at it later in better light, perhaps; beveled as it is though, the distortion of a rubbing might obscure or alter some small important detail. “Can you draw?”

“Oh, well,” says Tolfdir, stroking his beard modestly, “I won’t be asked to paint in Solitude any time soon, certainly, but I have been known to—doodle, as it were. On occasion. One must have hobbies, after all.”

---

Which is how he ends up on her shoulders, carefully copying the owl into her notes.

“The iconography really is all over the place,” he muses. “It will be worth reviewing my references once we get back, I believe. Most fascinating!”

“I’m sure it’ll be a—” He can’t see her, but she valiantly struggles to maintain a straight face anyway, on principle. “—hoot.”

The scrtch of paper pauses overhead as he laughs, sudden and delighted. “Yes, of course! I’ll be certain to gather, ah, owl the material required.”

“Ha! —whoops, sorry—” The laugh pitches him backwards with an oop!; she bites back her grin, standing straighter and rebalancing him. “If all else fails we may have to wing it.”

“Oh, no,” he says gravely, “that would be academically irresponsible.” When she sets him down, though, there’s a twinkle in his eye as he returns her notes. “Here you are: one mysterious owl, rendered to the best of these old hands’ capabilities. Onward, then,” he begins, looking preemptively pleased with himself; “while we still have a few unruffled feathers each.”

Her laughter rings out with an echo down the hall ahead of them. The dust that falls loose from the ceiling lands light as snow.

---

The room is just as she left it, mostly: the loose jaw of the skeleton in the sarcophagus at the center of the room has dropped to tangle with the collarbones. “Sorry,” Kharish whispers to the skull, gingerly lifting the mandible pieces back into place, pressing a touch of sticking shield to the joint with her thumb. It will almost certainly fall apart again, but not, at least, while they’re here. To Tolfdir, she says aloud, “There shouldn’t be anything new—I took the journal from the mouth, three pieces in worse shape from the shelf, and a rubbing of the inscription at the base of the platform.”

He has his nose poked rapturously into an urn when she turns around. “Funerary oils,” he says by way of explanation; “they vary slightly depending on region, era, belief—” A beat. He sniffs it again. “Decidedly floral,” he says, thoughtful. “Though gone quite stale, of course.”

There isn’t anything new, as predicted. She generally leaves the grave goods alone. No need to bother with anything that can’t be read or transcribed or translated. The dead should be allowed to keep whatever artefacts of life they have left, when they can; the ones that have opinions on the matter historically tend to agree on this. Much of what’s here, Kharish thinks, seems puzzlingly unimportant, as far as things left in tombs go. A cracked alchemical retort, bits of glass around the base, next to three also-smashed empty bottles. A plain, tarnished metal ring at the bottom of half a mug. A regular, if rotten, stick that (she checked) has no magical resonance whatsoever.

Checking through the shelves up against the wall for anything of interest, she pauses at a small metal figure of a wolf, on its side behind a cup and laid atop a disintegrating scarf. Cruder than an artisan’s rendition would be, with the tell-tale prick about it of something that’s been shaped with magic. The back of the head and the base of its ears have been worn smooth, as though by the meditative rubbing of a fingertip. Careful, she takes the wolf—small and disconcertingly cool in her palm. For Mara or for Ulfsild herself, she wonders. She can’t say it in any official capacity, as it’s a sentimental and unacademic thought, but it’s cute. And the soft shape of the ears and the tilt of the head do seem to invite touch.

No maker’s mark on it, though. Made then by someone who didn’t make a habit of magic metalworking? She sets the wolf upright on the scarf again, the clink of little inexpertly-shaped metal paws on the shelf muffled. It’s the only thing like itself in the room. Broken glass, broken dishes, dried-out inkpots, a rotting scarf, and a wolf. And lots of dust and dirt, but that’s a given.

Too many questions, really. She wipes her palms on her thighs and turns back to the center of the room. “What do you make of the epitaph?”

“A bit more hostile than epitaphs tend to be, curiously.” Tolfdir sets down a lens he’d been inspecting and nods back to the sarcophagus, peering at the plaque again. He threads his fingers through his beard in contemplation. “It’s rather—well, the person leaving the inscription clearly wishes regret upon the, ah, entombed, expressing triumph at outliving her, with some rather colorful language and a consumptive metaphor; though I’m not quite clear why.”

“A consumptive—oh,” she says; then, again, “oh.” The notes left pointedly wedged between the teeth. Hand to her mouth, she looks from him to the empty eye sockets of the skull. “—eat your words.”

#writing tag #Kharish gra-Shatul #FIELD TRIP TIME. FINALLY #clocking in at just over 2200 words whoops

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