Elder Scrolls One Shots

Lucien Lachance x fem reader - Pieces of You

You were the Champion of Cyrodiil. Hero of Kvatch, savior of Bruma, among many other titles. But then you were more or less a mercenary. The world had been saved, the only thing left was to wander around and search for problems to fix. You had a house, Arborwatch in Chorrol. But no parents. No lover, no family or other ties. All you had was free time. And thus, you found yourself in Bruma after making a round-trip of Cyrodiil.

You stopped at Olav's Tap and Tack to ask him for rumors. He told you there had been screaming heard coming from up the ways, "Sounded like it came from that old Applewatch farm." He had said. So that was where you went.

You didn't hurry, it was cold and the walk was short but icy. A bit daunting to you, yet nothing you couldn't handle.

When you arrived at the farm, everything seemed to be fine. There was an odd black horse stationed outside and quite a few footprints. But nothing seemed off until you noticed the bloody footprints trailing into the snow and disappearing just feet away from the front door. Unsheathing your weapon, you approached carefully. You knocked a couple times but no answer came. Steeling yourself to find someone or something dead inside, you opened the door and were met with the smell of blood and death. Your weapon clattered dramatically to the ground as your eyes glazed over in horror and you felt the need to vomit.

What you could only assume was what was left of a man was hung upside-down, strung from the rafters. Chunks of him were missing: his lower jaw, grafts of skin cut away, his ribs were exposed and perhaps some organs were missing. You could taste your own bile on your tongue as you tried not to let that urge take over, a hand over your mouth. You were unsure of what to do, so you cut him down to give a dead man some respect. For some reason, they had even castrated him. His long, black hair was caked in blood and grime and the sockets where his eyes once were dripped blood everywhere. He was still warm. . . This had just happened, you were only just too late.

"I'm so sorry." You whispered, tears spilling from your eyes. Your heart ached that you could not save him, with no clue as to what kind of a man he was. You wondered just maybe, if you had run, you could have saved him from such a horrible fate. Or maybe you would have ended up just the same. Whoever he was, he had put up a fight. Countless defensive wounds and deep gashes from blades. Blood in his fingernails that looked like maybe he had clawed at something in a desperate attempt to save his own life...

That's when you heard it. The soft, eerie voice of a woman whispering something into your ears. You looked around fervently, trying to find the source but there was no one around. Yet the voice was somehow so clear. You stopped to listen.

"Collect the pieces, my child. Sew him together and he shall be restored. This was not meant to be his fate." The woman said.

"Who are you? Show yourself!" You called out, absolutely terrified.

"In due time, my child. In due time..." her voice faded away and all that was left were the sounds of your own heaving breaths.

She was telling you to collect his body parts and sew them back on. To what end? To "restore" him? What good would that do besides offer peace at an open-casket funeral? The man was dead, you were clearly going insane. In shock from the sight you had witnessed. And what was that bit about fate?

Your mind was reeling and you were in deep thought before you even realized you were somehow already collecting pieces of him. You almost dropped an eyeball in pure terror, not recalling when you had begun or even decided to do what the disembodied voice asked. But you felt compelled to do so.

You picked up a basket, putting the gory pieces all in one spot. Like Mephala's idea of picking flowers in a meadow. You only wished it was all a Nightmare spun at the hands of a Daedra. Before you knew it, you had everything gathered together. And you searched the house to find a needle and thread, which the previous owner of the home, whose corpse you found tucked away in a closet, seemed to use often as a pass-time in her old age. Swallowing your feelings of disgust, you began sewing them back on to the best of your ability. The bits of skin, the major things like the jaw, popping the brown eyes into their bloody red sockets, re-locating the shoulder and closing wounds. When all was said and done and you had seen more that day than you ever wished to in a lifetime, you sat exhausted in the floor before him.

"I did what you asked, ghost woman!" You called out into the empty house. "What was this for? To torture me? To traumatize me? Well, it worked!" You cried. You felt a cold chill in the air.

"No," said the woman, "this is a gift for you, my new Listener." You were about to yell at the voice again, berate it about what kind of a fucked up gift that was. When you heard a groan and you stopped, looking at the man with wide eyes.

He didn't move, but something changed. The stitches began to disappear, the wounds began to heal, and he suddenly looked like nothing more than a sleeping young man. That's when he breathed in deeply, sucking air into his lungs that should have no longer worked. Was he alive?