Garnets Set in Silver (A Skyrim Adventure)

Garnets Set in Silver - Chapter One: The Welcome Wagon

Light swam in and out of her vision, vainly trying to break through the fog of pain and darkness. The right side of her face felt like it was twice the size of the left. Her body ached all over, the throbbing mementos left over by her assailants darkening her silvery gray skin. Oh, if they would stop bouncing her about, if the world would just stop lurching around. One particularly large bump sent a sharp, shooting pain racing up through her gut, pushing a desperate, heaving moan out of her. Those bastards...she'd kill them all if she could only move her arms. Strong leather straps bound her wrists together, so tight that the skin beneath was probably white by now. She was helpless. They made her helpless. The bastards.

"Hey,elf. Hey."

The voice punctured the mist and brought her mind back into focus. Low, accented, full of concern, but unfamiliar. Trying to ignore the hideous pain in her neck, she raised her head and opened her claret eyes. Her vision was still blurry and her thick white hair poured over her face, but she managed to make out the form of a rough-looking man in ragged chainmail. The darkness washed back over her and she fought it with all her might.

Steadily, she willed herself awake and the scene became clearer. She and three others sat bound on a carriage, bouncing along wooded path. Mountains rose high all around them, towering over the pines. The man across from her was a Nord, she was certain. He was the epitome of his race: blond, bearded, eyes of crystalline blue, muscles thick and knotted, handsome even through the dirt and bruises on his pale skin. A scraggly, sharp-nosed man in rags sat beside him, angrily twisting at his bonds, cursing under his breath. His thick mop of dirty brown hair flopped in his face as he writhed about in vain. Seated in the back of the carriage, so close to the edge that Yvora thought he might be attempting to slip away, sat a Nord in fur-topped robes with dark coppery hair trimmed to his shoulders, a dirty cloth smothering the lower half of his face. His eyes of gray steel seemed to burn right into her, and she couldn't tell if he were glaring at his situation or at her. Her instinct told her it was the latter case.

Turning back to the man sitting across from her, as he seemed the most amiable, she swallowed hard and managed to break up the dryness in her mouth. "What...happened?" She croaked, her voice sounding foreign to her ears.

"You're finally awake. Was worried about you. You took quite a thumping at the border. Walked right into that Imperial ambush same as us, and that thief over there." He jerked his head at the scrawny man with a look of disdain.

At the mention of the thief, she remembered just how she ended up in her painful predicament. Six weeks ago, she broke out of the Cheydinhal prison and stole a horse from a caravan. Through the trickling rumors down in the bowels of that hellhole, she heard of freedom fighters up in the kingdom of Skyrim. As a child in Morrowind, her parents, nobles of house Savilu, made frequent trips to the snowy province for trade and entertainment. She was too young to remember much about those trips, but what she did remember was a beautiful, sprawling countryside and glittering cities carved from stone. If it were anything like she remembered, it had to be better than living under the damned Concordant.

Weeks later, exhausted, nearly out of food, her horse dead miles back, she finally made it to the border of Cyrodiil just past the peaks of the Jeralls. She nearly ran right into the Imperial soldiers lying in wait, but managed to make it across unseen.

If she stayed hidden, she'd have been free to run, but the thief, the one the Nord spoke of with such bitterness, raced by her on that stolen horse. Her surprised scream alerted them all to her and the thief's presence. The horse, startled by her scream, threw the thief to the ground and ran off, never to be seen again. The soldiers advanced, calling for them to surrender. She remembered pulling the thief's rusty sword from his belt, her other hand sparking with electric energy. The first soldier that reached her found himself limed in the mystical lightning, screeching in agony as he rolled about on the forest floor, twitching and spasming.