Beyond the Pale

A Scarlet Letter

Castorius was in a hurry. And it was all thanks to that giant cosmic nincompoop, Sanguine.

Once he had stepped through the void to return from Oblivion, reasonably expecting to reappear in the dusty cellar of Nightgate Inn, he'd come damn close to crapping himself nearly falling off the mountainside onto which the portal had sporadically decided to relocate itself.

He realized now his mistake all along had been to take anything the erratic Daedric Prince said or did at face value. It wasn't a habit of Castorius' to ask too much of people. Regarding their general quality, he'd always thought himself equipped with a degree of expectation realistic enough to verge on downright cynical. What he hadcome to ask of them, however, was some basic level of reliability, the most diminutive of abilities to at least try and follow through and to live up to their word.

Generally, he'd found he might as well have asked for the moons.

Little surprise, then, that a being the likes of which the world was for the most part unanimously wary of, should turn out every little bit as unreliable as his mundane counterparts.

But it wasn't the inconvenient location of his return that had caused this hurry. It wasn't, after all, as if he'd appeared on the other side of the Empire—in Elsweyr or something—and had even after a brief reorientation figured out that he was still at the Pale. The problem was that even though he'd originally arrived at the Inn a good while before noon, and that the time he'd spent at Misty Grove couldn't have been more than half an hour, the first thing he'd realized after barely stopping himself from flying off the cliff was that the dusk had already descended.

That in itself might have been acceptable in other circumstances. The thing was, though, that the other reason he'd gone to fetch his Imperial attire—besides avoiding embarrassment returning to Dawnstar, and and to get another go at Kirsten—was that he'd had every intention to stay good to his word and to go have a word with Commodore Fair-Shield like he'd promised Roggie. Tell the man to look the other way in case any word of dealings with pirates happened to come to him.

Or, as his instincts screamed at him to do, to warn the man, to tell him to take his family and get as far away from the Pale as possible. Likely it would be wisest for him to flee Skyrim altogether.

It hardly needed emphasizing that Castorius had zero trust in Jaree-Ra's word to start with. But now, in the case that the Argonian had indeed survived the demise of his ship, he had even less reason to doubt the pirate would refrain from taking measures into his own scaly hands.

In any case, Castorius had—after a few moments of fervid planning—decided not to go to the Commodore as one Stormcloak sympathizer to another. He suspected this was a stubborn man, as older military people oft proved to be; and as a stubborn old military man, he might not give the time of day to some low-ranking whippersnapper's warnings.

So Castorius had devised another sort of cover story. He would not, in fact, directly warn the man at all. Instead, what he would do was pretend to be paying the man some sort of "routine" Imperial call, making it appear as fishy as he possibly could. He'd assure to the man—trying to come out totally insincere—that the Empire had no plans whatsoever to go after anyone for supporting rebellious activities. But in the same breath he'd in some roundabout way make it clear that the High King would very soon increase his military presence in the area.

He would somehow need to plant the idea in the Commodore's head that it at any moment the Imperial forces might roll in on the area and persecute anyone it considered to be giving aid to the Stormcloaks. It was Castorius' hope that this would get the Commodore to immediately go to Ulfric in search of protection. He wasn't sure about what might happen then . . .